Slashdot Mirror
How the Militarization of the Internet is Changing Warfare
puddingebola writes in with a link to a New York Times article about how the militarization of the internet is changing contemporary warfare. "The decision by the United States and Israel to develop and then deploy the Stuxnet computer worm against an Iranian nuclear facility late in George W. Bush's presidency marked a significant and dangerous turning point in the gradual militarization of the Internet. Washington has begun to cross the Rubicon. If it continues, contemporary warfare will change fundamentally as we move into hazardous and uncharted territory. It is one thing to write viruses and lock them away safely for future use should circumstances dictate it. It is quite another to deploy them in peacetime. Stuxnet has effectively fired the starting gun in a new arms race that is very likely to lead to the spread of similar and still more powerful offensive cyber-weaponry across the Internet. Unlike nuclear or chemical weapons, however, countries are developing cyber-weapons outside any regulatory framework."
We have been at ware since early 2000's. It's not peacetime.
I thought Stuxnet was transferred via USB.
http://www.matrixgp.com/?page_id=760
This is probably the most troubling part. If an entity that is at odds with the US could choose to deploy malware that would affect not just military, government or corporate networks, but civilian computers and services. There needs to be a cyberspace analogue to the Geneva Convention, to prevent the cyberwarfare from causing damage to civilian networks and services. Will these regulations follow or even enforcable? Probably not, but it's a nice thought.
Wasn't the original purpose of the Internet to serve the military?
"THE decision by the United States and Israel to develop and then deploy the Stuxnet computer worm against"
This hasnt been proven beyond reasonable doubt. Even though we all think US/Isreal are the curprits, all articles should start with an appropriate preface. This really needs to stop.
Since when does being a Socialist mean 'someone who has a different opinion than me'?
marked a significant and dangerous turning point in the gradual militarization of the Internet.
And all these attacks coming out of Chinese universities are what, game playing?
Military takes on all mediums so it was inevitable efforts would evolve. WW III (should it come) will certainly involve a lot of concentrated attacks over the web, to bring it down, because it's far faster communication than simple radio or Television and goes around the world in milliseconds.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Cyberwar, at least as it's currently conducted, doesn't kill people.
Also, what makes them think that regulations matter when you're talking about war? Look at the nuclear weapons treaties - North Korea, Pakistan, India, and Israel have all flaunted them by making nuclear weapons, and the US and Israel have flaunted them by attempting to prevent Iran from researching nuclear power for civilian purposes (which is allowed under non-proliferation treaties).
I am officially gone from
What complete and utter tripe! The Chinese, Russians and any number of other countries crossed the proverbial Rubicon many, many years ago. If the submitter is so naive as to think that this was the first example of state sponsored computer hacking against another state than the submitter needs to go to Defcon or any other security convention. Get real, get a clue.
... idiots using a piss poor OS shot full of security holes called Windows for mission critical infrastructure end up having the computers running said piss poor OS compromised or screwed up by some software that works off an abysmal security failure of a feature called autorun.
Sorry, but this isn't Tron just yet.
Peacetime? The US has only been at "peace" for a handful of years in its history, the rest of the years it has been fighting people abroad such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc. People within its own borders (Indian wars) or arming, training and supporting violence in other countries ("war on drugs"). By abolishing peacetime, the government is allowed to ransack our liberties, steal our income even more and stifle dissent. Keep in mind we are still under a state of emergency because of "terrorism" first enacted by Bush and then extended every year by Obama.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
It is a grossly inaccurate to state "Stuxnet has effectively fired the starting gun in a new arms race...". On the contrary, Stuxnet only makes a large percentage of the population aware of an arms race that started long ago.
Washington has begun to cross the Rubicon.
I thought Washington crossed the Delaware. When was he in Italy? Now I'm all confused.
--
.nosig
Considering nearly every protocol and major advancement on the internet has been through DARPA the world will probably be fine. But making unfounded ridiculousness claims is a great way to hype up a book you are going to sell in stores.
if "regulatory framework" = "laws of nature"
then $answer = 1
sudo make me a sandwich
Comparing military software viruses or tojans with chemical or nuclear weapons is totally inadequate.
Apart from that, yes, the US and Israel have set a bad precedent. Countries shouldn't just be allowed to attack other countries and get away with it, be the attack on the Net or more conventional. Apart from giving a bad example to the rest of the worlds, these kinds of "cyber" attacks are also just plain stupid, they do not make the world one grain more secure in the long run and will just encourage the victim nations to retaliate with their own "cyber" weapons.
It is discouraging that the people in charge have not learned from history or, even worse, erroneously believe that the Soviet Union fell because of the western demonstration of military power rather than by their own people and the self-collapse of communist bureaucracy and ideology.
...a significant and dangerous turning point.... If it continues, contemporary warfare will change fundamentally as we move into hazardous and uncharted territory....
You mean, just like when gunpowder was invented? Or when troops started using wheeled vehicles instead of horses?
Or when militaries started using... GASP!... aircraft?
Get a clue. Warfare is always changing fundamentally as it moves into "uncharted territory" made possible by new technology.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
Combine the explosion of cyberwarfare with the advances in organic "inkjet printing" compound creation (e.g. http://www.psmag.com/health/making-medical-miracles-with-inkjet-printers-26770/ ), and you get: Internet Virus Causes Home Printers to Generate Plague / Ebola / Marshmallow Fluff.
-- clearly I consider all 3 to be of equal horror --
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
I never understood 'rules' of war. If someone runs from (the symbolic) me into a church, I say nuke the church. If my bullets can mutilate instead of kill, and in the end bring victory, then I shoot mutilating bullets. If my biological weapon can be easily deployed into your water supply, why shouldn't they be?
The US started this war. And the rules of war, equivalent to laws, will only be followed by US law abiding citizens, not our enemy targets When we get another 9/11 level attack, don't be so naive this time, we started it (the same as last time).
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
Unlike nuclear or chemical weapons, however, countries are developing cyber-weapons outside any regulatory framework.
Gentlemen. You can't fight in here. This is the War Room!
Could we stop such stupid wording? There's no war here. Nobody has died or is dying because of what they are pretending are weapons, which are in fact just a bunch of bits. This is becoming very silly, and I don't buy into this propaganda.
.lnk!!!) and not doing security house keeping correctly (files signed with certs they should be in the control of in the case of flame, and windows update not being totally unsafe).
And by the way, instead of falsely using an important word such as "war", we'd better highlight and focus on how much Microsoft is the responsible here. Responsible in both having stupid security holes (come on... executing code in a
Someone should note that while everyone watches Stux and similar, the Chinese have been carrying out Cyberwar, and constructive espianage for many years now. Their aggressive war activity has netted, and continues to net them economic gains far far outstripping the silly games being played around the Iranian nuclear program.
And, further, unless its actually challenged, the price and cost of that makes the Iranian Nuclear issue peanuts.
We`re all equal
What is this "peacetime" of which you speak? Sounds fascinating...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Am I the only one who is struck by the irony of that statement? Remember that military funding was behind the initial research and development of the Internet we use today. It's almost as if they allowed the private sector to spend their time and energy to develop and expand it for them, so they could again use it for their own purposes..
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Part of the goals was a distributed network with no "head" could be knocked out in an attack. The 14 root name-servers are the closest thing to a head.
Cyberwar - When the "elite" consider security a matter of disciplining users, and the rest of the world goes along with it.
Security - when you don't trust things more than you have to... a feature not available in Windows, Mac OSX, nor Linux.
Step 2. Fire missiles.
Step 3. ?
Step 4. Profit!
Oh wait, Step 1 should buy 'Buy stock in defense contractors'.
The United States constantly declares war. There's been the "War on Drugs", the "War on Terror" - not to mention the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan and undeclared wars in places like Somalia and Yemen - where military actions (or drone-bourne assasinations) take place regularly.
The thing is, wars are wonderful devices for a democratically elected government. They allow a "wartime" footing to be established where a lot of peacetime protections, rights and restrictions can simply be tossed aside. War is as much a state of mind as a military action. If a country considers itself at war, a lot of the things that its citizens would be permitted to do become criminalised, or at least subject to official scrutiny.
This is exactly what's happened since 2001. The problem is that now we have governments all over the world - previously responsible, western governments that were considered "enlightened" are now viewing all their citizens as potential enemies, criminals or terrorists - and are treating them according to that suspicion.
If you think that cyberspace is too abstract a place to have a war, just look out for all the critical infrastructure that is accessible on the internet. Facilities that any government would be mad to let people walk into unchallenged can (I'm told) be hacked. Whether it's by a script-kiddie or a Stuxnet wielding super-power is immaterial. It's a state of conflict and peoples' rights are being squashed in order to counter it. That sure sounds like a war - even if the enemy is us.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
...seems to be unnecessary flame-mongering. As I recall stuxnet was brought to a isolated (as any such industrial control system should be) intranet using an infected pen-drive.
Bottom line, if your network contains anything of critical state importance, don't connect it to anything.
The article seems to think that the US is the first to pull the "Cyber Warfare" trigger. That is just silly. The only thing different here is that the US government was silly enough to ADMIT that they were partially responsible for Stuxnet virus, etc. The US civilian industry, and military assets have been under constant attack by various "actors" for over a decade. The only difference is those "actors" haven't admitted it or been caught red-handed. Most likely (and again they haven't been dumb enough to admit it like the US), the Chinese government has been one main Cyber Warfare protagonist that is constantly assailing US assets. So everyone get off their High Horses and face the real world.
The simple fact is we chose to fire bits at em, instead of nukes! Seems like an improvement in my mind!
Have you compiled your kernel today??
Washington has begun to cross the Rubicon...
Begun crossing the Rubicon? That's bad word choice for a cliche that refers to a definite, irreversible commitment. What's next? Gradually falling head-over-heals in love? A mild gut-wrenching pain? Tentative writing on the wall?
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
That's the thing about wars and rules. The rules are only followed by one side, typically the losing side unless there is some major imbalance of power. I'm all for worldwide peace, but the winning side is unlikely to follow any rules we set.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I just wonder, is there no way to ensure that these machines are properly locked down?
At home I run a WinXP VM that boots from a locked volume and a delta disk.
I can always diff any system files (and in fact have a script that does this) against an MD5 hash of the install files.
I can re-hash after running a windows update.
more than once I've found that the machine has changed in a way that I think is undesirable and I revert it.
I would think these SCADA systems would be relatively easy to do the same thing with, prior to boot, verify the integrity of the media, then boot if good.
I realize it is likely overkill for a home user (me), but for a country's nuclear program I would think this is part and parcel to normal operation.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Please see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon
Duh. And goodnight.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
It's a wild and wooly world out there, folks, and what you're seeing is the difference between an open society and closed ones. Russian, Chinese, DPRK, terrorist, and organized crime entities have been working aggressively to field all sorts of bots, viruses, and trojans designed to inflict harm or break into US systems for at least a decade.
When Israel and/or the US do it, it's almost inevitable that *someone* will find out, and at the NYT, they interpret this as "OMG look at what we're doing!"
By the same measure, one could blame the police for increasing violence by deciding to employ firearms. In fact, that's pretty much exactly what the NYTs position is on the 2nd amendment, so at least they're consistent, if absurdly naive.
-Styopa
You seem to think that war is about everything *but* money. On the contrary, war (i.e. military spending) is 100% about money. The dirty little secret is that "power over the people" isn't the end goal at all; power is merely a stepping stone to the real end goal: money. The "Hitlers" of the world -- those who are motivated by power alone -- are *extremely* rare. These are the mentally ill. The vast majority of career politicians don't actually "enjoy" stealing your god-given right to self-ownership; what they enjoy is the profit they reap from it.
Your rights are NEVER oppressed for the sake of oppression! Your rights are oppressed for profit. Not very romantic, is it?
Your VM isn't secure, you only think it is because the machine that you're running it on says that it's secure. Are you running it off a live CD? Where did you get it from? Where did you get your md5 check program from? Where did that USB stick come from? What about your hardware, did you just get a cheap Chinese-made box from Best Buy?
Who's to say that your "real" machine isn't compromised? Sure, it's fine against the drive-by attacks of Botnet operators, but have you gone up against a military-grade threat?
The expression used to be that the only secure computer is one that's in a separate room, powered down and unplugged, and encased in concrete. Now I'm not so sure...
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
It is my understanding that Stuxnet got in on a USB stick: nothing at all to do with the Internet !
(True the actual controllers were networked to the compromised Windows PCs, but still not the "internet".)
As an individual cowering in a corner in the basement of my own home, I have no defense against a Predator with a hellfire missile that has mistaken my house for the one with a family of Muslims one block over. Against these kinds of weapons, however, I have some pretty good defenses. They would have to infiltrate my ActionTec DSL modem (okay, that'd be easy), but then they'd have to figure out what ancient custom-hacked-on slackware kernel I'm running for a NAT box and get into it without the other one running tripwire and tcpdump detecting it. They'd also be pretty helpless against my remote power controller, which I can use to reboot stuff, because it talks via RS-232 and they'd be reduced to trying to hack into it at 2400 baud. Even if they were highly successful and managed to disrupt my weekend WoW raid, they would only kill my character. They wouldn't actually be able to kill me.
I'll take these cyber-warfare weapons jamming up the internets and clobbering my parent's computer over them dropping Hellfires and McDonnell-Douglas cluster bombs in my neighborhood any day of the week.
It is my understanding that Stuxnet got in on a USB stick: nothing at all to do with the Internet !
(True the actual controllers were networked to the compromised Windows PCs, but still not the "internet".)
Much like everything our government does, Facts do not matter, just the propaganda (They call it PR these days).
Be seeing you...
Your use of the phrase 'the militarization of the internet' bothers me. DARPANET was founded by the military; it was only in the 1990's that the internet became commercialized, and made friendly to civilians. Never forget that the prime purpose of the internet was to found a command and control structure, to keep communications open to Cleveland if Chicago got nuked. Stop worrying about the militarization of a military network. This is a straw man.
You're free to create your own peacenik network, open and free of government control. But never forget that the US government will commandeer control of the Internet as it sees fit, according to what they believe is important for the security of our country and the safety of its citizens, whether or not they're correct.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
"The decision by the United States and Israel to develop and then deploy the Stuxnet computer worm against an Iranian nuclear facility late in George W. Bush's presidency..."
Of course the Obama administration bears no responsibility...they just leaked the information and were completely helpless to do anything.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Even if you could specify a set of rules, how would you trace violators? If TOR can protect child porn addicts, why not "Defence" departments?
Epitaph: At last! Root access!
The decision by the United States and Israel to develop and then deploy the Stuxnet computer worm against an Iranian nuclear facility late in George W. Bush's presidency marked a significant and dangerous turning point in the gradual militarization of the Internet.
Chinese gov. has been doing this for over a decade. NOW, ppl want to point fingers at W, while disregarding what CHina (and North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and probably Russia) is doing? Seriously?
Look,I am well known for my disdain of neo-cons and the harm that they cause. However, to point a finger to W while ignoring the facts of other nations developing spy and attack virus, is just plain out there.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I can not stand W or any neo-cons, BUT, it is best to stick to honest facts, rather than make up garbage. And in this case, it has been nations like China being the most aggressive on this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.