Slashdot Mirror
Germany Readying Offensive Cyberwarfare Unit, Parliament Told
concertina226 writes to note that it's not just the U.S. that's increasingly open about using malware as an offensive tool of state security: From the TechWorld story: "According to German reports, the Bonn-based Computer Network Operations (CNO) unit had existed since 2006 but was only now being readied for deployment under the control of the country's military. 'The initial capacity to operate in hostile networks has been achieved,' a German press agency reported the brief document as saying. The unit had already conducted closed lab simulations of cyber-attacks."
"Unlike physical attacks," concertina226 writes, "cyber-weapons can't be isolated from their surroundings with the same degree of certainty. If, as a growing body of evidence suggests, the U.S. Government sanctioned the use of cyber-malware such as Stuxnet, are the authorities also held responsible should such campaigns hit unintended victims?"
This German Cyberwarfare Unit? I consider it Offensive.
oh
for a bitskrieg?
Denmark, Norway, Poland, the Benelux states, etc., should consider moving them elsewhere.
Instead of fixing this situation (our broken computer security model) we've been blaming Vendors, Users, Programmers, government. None of this is going to fix it.
When you can confuse a root process and get root, nothing is safe. Windows, Mac, Linux, all are vulnerable to this.
It doesn't have to be this way.
I was hoping there were going to stumble about farting, making off-colour jokes and reaching across other people's plates to get the ketchup.
On other news "Lebens Interraum" is new bookshelf buster ...
[ducks]
No, no, no, you all misunderstand. By "Offensive Cyberwarfare Unit", they just mean the group will be incredibly rude. It's all in intimidation, people!
The future is here guys!
When we are at war we do not compensate innocents struck with bombs or bullets. To suggest that we will compensate innocents who are unintentionally injured by cyber warfare would severely effect the ability of our nation to defend itself. Sadly, where ever there is conflict there will always be innocent victims caught in the cross fire.
Cyber-malware? As...opposed to...um...this 'cyber' business is getting out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it. Cyberwarfare with cyberwarriors and cybermalware in cyberspace. What year is this? 1995?
Bombs are expensive. You want to stop enemy production in a war, right? So you blow up the factories, the power plants, etc.
What if, instead of blowing them up, you just shut them all off? It worked with Iran's atomic development and ushered in a new era of warfare. Up until WWI, war was a grand and glorious adventure, swords and arrows, showing the bad guys what for! Then chemical weapons killed so many people all at once, the game wasn't fun anymore, but you could still send your plebians out to rattle your sabres. Once atomics showed up, we go to the point where war could kill the country's leaders as well as the people sent out to the front lines.
This new era lets anyone, anywhere, pick off any target. You can shut down an Iranian centrifuge. You can dig up dirt on the Prime Minister and give it to the newspaper. Everyone with an Internet connection has the potential to hold a weapon far more dangerous and far more powerful than anything that goes "bang". We can make anyone, anywhere, go "whimper".
That's why we're seeing cyberwarfare units and Internet censorship / monitoring. We can't have people rocking the boat.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
You mean collateral damage? Non issue. This is WAR!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
After all, this is the country that has been sponsoring data theft from neighbouring Switzerland (and then got very upset when a warrant was issued for the tax officials involved instead of acknowledging that they have effective stimulated crime).
The Internet has simply become the latest platform for economic espionage. I really don't think it's only the major nations - I think every country is trying to build up capability, even if just to work out some form of defensive strategy.
So much talent wasted..
"'The initial capacity to operate in hostile networks has been achieved,'" Took them 6 years to notice their ethernet cable wasnt plugged in?
But that's exactly the problem: when war is cheap, the primary reason for war no longer exists (it being the fastest way to convert tax money into fat profits for the chosen few). Personally, I don't see cyberwar be a major component of warfare, only of espionage.
No, they are not Americans... The Germans are known for being competent.
Notice that this was announced shortly after IPv6 was "rolled out". You're right, they're looking for more space, address space!
This new era lets anyone, anywhere, pick off any target.
And that right there is the problem.
In the past, when war was purely about bombs and boots on the ground, you could rely on your physical defenses and alliances to protect you from retaliation.
The USA and Germany don't have to worry about Jihadist drones dropping bombs on New York or Dusseldorf,
But they certainly have to worry about malicious hackers with a grudge.
Today, the internet is such a soft target that it's tragic.
The developed world may be starting a war where they can't project numerical or tactical superiority.
LulzSec and Anonymous show that you don't need the resources of the NSA to go after big targets.
http://cryptome.org/2012/06/lulzsec-sneak-preview.htm
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
And by "shut off", you mean disable safety functions, and then cycle at a rate causing harmonic resonance until the centrifuge literally explodes, quite possibly actually killing somebody nearby right?
Make no mistake -- it was an act of espionage and war.
Destroying both the target and the user.
Ingrates.
you know, the uniform, the lowslung stun ray holster, the mindless tedium
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
I mean it was written by the NSA ... and given the recent Microsoft certificate debacle, what should we consider safe?
Is this a bad thing? If war no longer has borders, maybe everyone will have to think in more cosmopolitan terms.
But cheap upsets the status quo. Conventional war is (and always was) expensive. And that means you can predict the outcome based on GDP. Not so with cyber war. Almost anyone can play and wealth serves to provide more targets, not more weapons. So it turns the winner/loser equation on its head.
And what cyber war doesn't do, which makes it feared, is to directly produce body count. Body count is what makes war morally abhorrent. The cold war never turned 'hot' because all of the major players found the outcome to be unacceptable, even in the event of their winning. With cyber war, the perception is going to be that a bunch of banks and other financial institutions are damaged or taken down. And right now, that's even a fantasy of the average Joe, not a terrifying prospect.
Have gnu, will travel.
and im not telling you....
Who knew! All this time I was learning coding I was actually training to be a soldier! Well, that's one less thing on the bucket list...
Then chemical weapons killed so many people all at once, the game wasn't fun anymore, but you could still send your plebians out to rattle your sabres.
Unfortunately for your thesis, it wasn't chemical weapons that made things "not fun" (they were too uncertain to be reliable weapons) but rather more prosaic things like machine gun nests and artillery.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
World war 2 computers were not a big thing. Calculation where done largely mechanically in the field and the internet did not exist, yet there were nukes. Cyberwarfare is bullshit and the lie relies upon unprepared and insecure enemy with computers connected to the internet. The reality of course is a free for attacks people, corporations and the internet backbone itself. Anything but a purely defensive stature is insane. Any bugs or security failures that are found and then not disclosed to be corrected is simply relying on dumb luck that the enemy doesn't also find them and use. Basically any attack only suits criminals with criminal intent.
If you're going to play bullshit games like that, just use off the shelf hardware to create a stealth cruise missile to start murdering foreigners and destroying technical infrastructure at random. If it is all about being destructive and not getting caught when go half measures. If you hacks when released start infecting hospital prescriptions and making lethal alterations, really just how stupid has your cyberwarfare game become.
No government department ever has the right to with hold discovered faults from repair in the hopes of deploying it themselves only to see their own citizens become victims of it when used by organised crime. That's what bullshit cyber warfare is really about. Find back doors, keep them secret and then toss them aside when criminals also start finding and using them and basically screw the victims created until the fault is fixed. Instead of proper policing find back doors and remove them. In fact what you end up with government departments working against each other at taxpayer expense.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
It turns out that you should care about the "chain of trust", and "trusted computing base" type terms, but not if they are used to back DRM.
When you do want to pay attention is when the developers of Genode talk about them in their development of a microkernel based (pick 1 of the 8 they offer) operating system which uses capability based security, and yet can run linux inside of itself.
Genode is cool stuff...