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US and China Held Secret Cyber Wargames
judgecorp writes "Despite the accusations that have flown both ways between the countries, the US and China have co-operated in wargames, held in secret in Beijing and Washington, designed to head off escalations in hostilities. From the article: 'During the first exercise, both sides had to describe what they would do if they were attacked by a sophisticated computer virus, such as Stuxnet, which disabled centrifuges in Iran's nuclear program. In the second, they had to describe their reaction if the attack was known to have been launched from the other side.'"
US: We send you a group of spies with Stuxnet virus on USB drives.
China: Virus was incompatible with our hardware and software, we caught your spies and keep them in prison forever.
China: Our spies stolen Outlook password while your diplomat was emailing our documents to CIA. We discovered that the same password works on all VPNs in CIA and NSA where your spy-diplomat had an account, and got encryption keys for all your drones in the Middle East.
US: You can't, we have Norton!
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
And, as a reaction, they outlawed the internet entirely with SOPA / CRIPPA / Heaven knows what the law is called today?
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Sounds like a form of what are referred to as "confidence building measures" taken in various treaties aimed at reducing arms or reducing the chance of war. Interesting form though.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
What we have here is a pen-and-paper exercise between two groups of bigwigs where there were asked a few questions about what they would do, and we have no idea if they answered truly or not. What is this story doing here? We must not have anything to talk about today.
For Cyberwarfare to be able happen to begin with, critical IT systems on both sides would have to be connected to the Internet, right? Question: Why are those critical IT systems connected-to/reachable by Internet to begin with? Wouldn't you keep those systems AWAY from the Internet, and connect them together using some custom-laid fiberoptic WAN or something? Wouldn't you - for security's sake - maybe use custom CPUs/OSs on those systems that aren't even available on the free market? (i.e. having Intel or AMD or ARM manufacture a few thousand non-X86 compatible custom CPUs for you... running a custom-flavour of Linux on them that isn't compatible with the original Linux at all).
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Actually, it ended with a game of Tic-Tac-Toe.
I am sure you do. But, do you mean Shitzu, or Pomeranian?
Wargame. Oxymoron.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
So, am I the only one wondering just how there's any guarantee whatsoever that these "descriptions" represent full disclosure and complete accuracy? How about this:
China: We got your NSA admin login(s) through a botnet we planted in the USA, which eventually made it into your office. (Reality: we have a mole in your office who installed surveillance devices and then told us all the logins he could determine.) We then upload lots of spy/malware and own (all) your base.
USA: We use our custom-made antivirus software (AKA Norton Antivirus or some other junk, probably) to scour our system of all your malware. (Reality: you really just found our honeypot. Now your attack computers are being used to feed malware into your systems. By the way, the mole is a double agent.)
I guess I can't see how these exercises are reliably going to be used for anything but PR/propaganda and disinformation. It's obvious that each government sees the other as a potential threat (why would they even be worried about all this if not?), so it would be mind-bogglingly stupid for either side to explain exactly how the attacks will be done, and how incoming attacks would be countered. It's on the same level of "stupid" as giving the enemy complete briefings on our troop dispositions and armaments. So, I imagine that all that's really going on is something like:
USA: We attack your stuff. ...
China: We defend against your attacks, then counterattack.
USA: We defend against your attacks, then counterattack.
[several million tax dollars later]
USA: That was productive. We're friends, now, right?
China: Of course, we are. Let's shake hands in front of the cameras. You'll lower your firewalls, now, right?
USA: Not a chance. You?
China: Dream on.
Does anyone else see how obtuse this seems?
China to US: All your base are belong to us!
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.