'Legitimized' Cyberwar Opens Pandora's Box of Dirty Tricks

DillyTonto writes "U.S. officials have acknowledged playing a role in the development and deployment of Stuxnet, Duqu and other cyberweapons against Iran. The acknowledgement makes cyberattacks more legitimate as a tool of not-quite-lethal international diplomacy. It also legitimizes them as more-combative tools for political conflict over social issues, in the same way Tasers gave police less-than-lethal alternatives to shooting suspects and gave those who abuse their power something other than a club to hit a suspect with. Political parties and single-issue political organizations already use 'opposition research' to name-and-shame their opponents with real or exaggerated revelations from a checkered past, jerrymander districts to ensure their candidates a victory and vote-suppression or get-out-the-vote efforts to skew vote tallies. Imagine what they'll do with custom malware, the ability to DDOS an opponent's web site or redirect donations from an opponent's site to their own. Cyberweapons may give nations a way to attack enemies without killing anyone. They'll definitely give domestic political groups a whole new world of dirty tricks to play."

Comments

What about Stuxnet's unintended victims?

[Mannfred]

If a hacker gets caught causing damage to a company's infrastructure it's hard to imagine him not going to jail and/or having to pay for the damages he/she caused. Given that Stuxnet spread around the world, do the victims get to send their cleanup bills to Uncle Sam?

Don't forget

[PopeRatzo]

This is an arena where a few motivated civilians can play, too.

At the moment, I'll put Anonymous or a group of Eastern European boys I met a few years ago against the best that a political party's "opposition team" can put together.

Playing War in a distributed worldwide network is not the same as throwing a bunch of hardware onto a battlefield.

So far, the best armies on the Internet are not the ones affiliated with a government or establishment political party. Hell, despite the Octopus doing its best, Pirate Bay and wikileaks are still up and running. If they go down, I'll be more worried.

Don't kid yourselves

[Shoten]

"Cyberweapons may give nations a way to attack enemies without killing anyone."

I doubt very much that there was no loss of life involved in Stuxnet's effects. A P2 gas centrifuge that spins so fast that there are only a few metal alloys in the world that are tough enough to hold together. When one of those tubes lets go because it wobbles at one of the unstable speed zones it enters, or because it over-runs (as Stuxnet made happen), it's like a grenade going off. As I recall the estimate was that at least 40% of the centrifuges at Natanz failed in this fashion...and I find it difficult to imagine that nobody was ever standing near any of them when it happened.