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US Cyber Command Discloses Offensive Cyberwarfare Capabilities
MojoKid writes "Earlier this week, the newly minted head of the United States' Cyber Command team and NSA head General Keith Alexander told assembled lawmakers that the U.S. has created an offensive cyberwarfare division designed to do far more than protect U.S. assets from foreign attacks. This is a major change in policy from previous public statements — in the past, the U.S. has publicly focused on defensive actions and homegrown security improvements. General Alexander told the House Armed Services Committee, 'This is an offensive team that the Defense Department would use to defend the nation if it were attacked in cyberspace. Thirteen of the teams that we're creating are for that mission alone.' This is an interesting shift in U.S. doctrine and raises questions like: What's proportional response to China probing at utility companies? Who ought to be blamed for Red October? What's the equivalent of a warning shot in cyberspace? When we detect foreign governments probing at virtual borders, who handles the diplomatic fallout as opposed to the silent retribution?"
And that'll be that !!
Sure, the saying goes: if you want peace prepare for war.
But what if you do not want peace, what if war proved to be much more profitable for people who are top ranking political officials and their buddies? Well, then you accuse everybody else of wanting war and attack first.
So this here I came up with just now: If you want war, accuse others of warmongering and attack them.
You can't handle the truth.
Stuxnet.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
>What's proportional response to China probing at utility companies?
Redirect all traffic coming from the Peoples Army to goatse.
>Who ought to be blamed for Red October?
Sean Connery. What kind of Russian has a Scottish accent. "I know this book. Your conclusions were all wrong. Halsey acted foolishly."
>What's the equivalent of a warning shot in cyberspace?
Redirecting the Great Firewall to Justin Bieber's Twitter feed. Or making a press release detailing our cyberwarfare capabilites.
>When we detect foreign governments probing at virtual borders, who handles the diplomatic fallout as opposed to the silent retribution?
If there is diplomatic fallout then it wasn't really "silent retribution" was it? Take turns making it alternately look like Anon or Isreal.
Ten years from now, a Pulitzer Prize winning photo of President Christie, or maybe President Hillary, in the War Room, head slung low, hand across furrowed brow.
"President micro-managing the war, agonizes over accidental bombing of Habbo Hotel."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
joshua is the logon no password needed.
This nonsense is merely a result of defense contractors managing to convince the decision-makers that this kind of capability is necessary. Some imagined threat of "cyberwarfare" (that at most could do about the same damage to the United States as a widespread power outage) is used to justify spending untold billions on a division of... what? Are these people supposed to be hackers? information gatherers? Cyber-warriors just sounds cool I guess. Let's go through the fundamentals: Who is the enemy? What threat do they pose? What damages have we suffered in the past that could have been prevented? What kind of damage could be inflicted using what weapons, exactly? What does international law say about this activity? How closely can this related to actual war? I doubt lawmaker in that hearing could answer any of those questions accurately.
As if American companies like Google aren't already leading experts in online security. Google is full of smart people, they can take care of their own front gate.
We live in an exciting time. Stuxnet opened Pandora's box, so-to-speak. However for all that technology, I'm more worried about lunatics with assault rifles. That stuff is REAL.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
I got cyberspace, cyberwarfare, virtual, and cyber command.
Also: "begs the question" does not mean what you think it means.
It should be called cyber espionage, and handled as an intelligence issue. Just like there's always spying, there will never be a "cyber peace". Threatening with a counterattack is based on a bad analogy, and doesn't work in this scenario.
This is an interesting shift in US doctrine and begs questions like:
No it doesn't.
Cyberwar is kinda dumb when you can instawin with an EMP!
Just scare tactics.
I'm deeply troubled by the lack of understanding that most major world governments have regarding information technology. These are people who still believe copying a file is theft, that the internet and the world wide web are synonymous, and that using encryption must mean you're a criminal. As they do not understand many of the fundamentals of information technology, how can we expect them to make reasonable and informed decisions about the use of the military in response to threats against that infrastructure?
We have had a disasterous serious of wars starting with Vietnam due to a lack of understanding (or willful ignorance) by politicians, leading to massive loss of life because they completely lacked situational awareness. In Iraq, the picture of Bush sitting in front of his "Mission: Accomplished" banner is a running joke even to this day, not because we didn't "beat" Iraq, but because we got stuck in a quagmire of tribal politics, shifting political opinions at home, and soldiers that were not trained for the new paradigm of urban warfare. Our military has traditionally not been a police force, and yet increasingly that's what we're using it for, with disasterous results. The road has not been smooth. I mean no disrespect to our military, or any of the militaries of the world in this, but it's something that institutionally has taken a long time to even approach this point.
When we look at this in a historical context, it becomes clear exactly just how dangerous a military response to an IT crisis would be. The President is talking about an "internet kill switch", as are many other governments. This kind of thinking is wrong-headed and shows a remarkable lack of understanding of both the economic and sociopolical consequences of such a thing, let alone were it even technologically feasible without a massive outlay of funds in the middle of a global recession.
The notion that we need to protect ourselves from foreign powers attacking our critical electronic, financial, and informational assets is unquestionably sound. But tasking the military with this protection, with the current command staff and structure, is intrinsically dangerous. In layman's terms, they don't know what they're doing.
There needs to be a radical paradigm shift in military doctrine to even approach this new battlefield, let alone participate responsibly and meaningfully in it. In this field, the idea of units, divisions, generals, etc., have no analogue. Amongst our senior and most capable information technology assets, peer collaboration and decentralized information gathering and sharing is vastly more effective than the traditional military hierarchy. We need the capability to tear down and rebuild teams as needed, in a fluid and dynamic environment where individual soldier-actors within it are afforded a wide degree of freedom to make individual judgement calls. This is not a battlefield that is amiable to traditional tactics like "Throw 10,000 people at it. Stop when it dies."
What I've seen so far is that the people who would call upon these military assets are completely uninformed about what they are realistically capable of, their relative strengths and weaknesses, and the costs and risks involved. Most of the people in the military are underinformed about this as well, but they are improving at (for an institution) a remarkable rate. They are still far behind.
In light of all of this... I have serious reservations about going offensive. We're not even sure what we're defending yet, or how, or why. It's all shades of grey, and when we're talking about taking military action, grey isn't tolerable.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Cyberwarfare has the potential to do LOT of damage. If every file on your home computer and backups were wiped out, how many of your hours would it take to recover. Multiply by say 100 million. Multiply by the value of the average computer users time. If say 100 million credit card numbers were stolen and used to make say a billion random small on-line purchases, what would it cost to back it all out? What are the digital rights to all of your paid-for content and software worth? Again multiply by 100 million.
We live in a society where information is valuable. I think it is a mistake to only consider the physical damage that cyber-warfare could cause.
I'm not saying that there is a credible attack that could do any of the above, just that low-security systems collectively represent a high value target, so it makes sense to consider how to protect against such an attack. I have no idea if the specific plans of the US make any sense.
I'd like to see some international treaties on cyber warfare to understand what sorts of attacks and responses meet international law.
"An offensive team that the Defense Department would use to defend"? That's offensive to logic.
uh oh its skynet....
Ralph Langner (the guy who figured out Stuxnet was designed to attack Iran) has been critical of the US's policies of focusing on offensive capabilities while largely ignoring or grossly underfunding defensive capabilities. He wrote a op-ed in the NYT about this. Hereis his rebuttal to Obama's executive order on critical infrastructure cyber security.
One of the problems with cyber defensive security is that too many companies use "risk assessment", which is inappropriate for security concerns. This is because risk assessment assumes that you are aware of all possible vulnerabilities and what impact these vulnerabilities will have, which is impossible. It is too easy for companies to use a risk assessment model as an excuse for not spending any money on their security, because the costs of security show up on a balance sheet while the benefits do not.
Attacks from identifiable sources in China or Russia are just exploratory research. Any serious attack would be launched from botnets running on computers belonging to citizens and companies in the country being attacked. Counter-attacking will just increase the damage. Poorly designed and maintained computers are like tinder waiting to be set alight and bring down the whole forest.
Defensive tech always lag offensive tech. The best deterrent is always the psychological one backed by offensive capability -- instead of intercepting the actual bullet, you intercept the very thought of firing that bullet by clearly defining the consequences of such action. This is basic doctrine whose rationale Slashdotters readily accept with regard to Iran's and North Korea's pursuit of weapons, yet somehow choose to mire themselves in morality here.
Stuxnet didn't "open Pandora's box"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Rain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora
Deaths caused by "lunatics with assault rifles" are insignificant in number compared to those caused by poor teenage urban males with handguns and zero conflict management skills.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/j-travis-smith/gun-control_b_2396473.html
The lives lost of the students and teachers of Sandy Hook were no more precious or tragic than the victims of murders occurring daily. The sheer rate of death caused by a single assault rifle pushed this event into the spotlight, although assault rifle death tolls are dwarfed by handguns in aggregate. As an example, the death toll of all mass shootings nation-wide in the 13 years since Columbine totals 273, while drive-by shootings in LA during a single year total 277.
Nice use of the Standard Template for Pro-Government Action:
1) Lead with wildly exaggerated scenario that you make out to be super-scary
2) Middle paragraph that's patriotic and tough-sounding without actually saying anything that anyone doesn't already know, but presented as if its some kind of special revelation that only a super-tough uber-patriot could possibly have come up with.
3) Close with a polite disavowal of the lead paragraph's wildly exaggerated super-scary scenario, so no one can call you out for promoting fear and arguing from completely unrealistic threats.
The only place where you lose points is that your original scenario is too transparently lame. Losing all our cat pics is going to cost the economy a million dollars per person? I don't think so.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Their role is to gather intelligence and secure sensitive government information.
That is it.
By developing these capabilities they make themselves a target, which can only negatively impact their primary mission. Maybe another IC member can pick up the SIGINT and crypto role that NSA seems to be abandoning.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I wonder what is meant with US Assets, and when (not if) it will include US Intellectual Property.
If you want to prevent "cyber" war, then let it be known that your policy is to treat every "cyber" action as its physical/kinetic equivalent. If China hacks into and disables a power grid, then treat it as if they sent in a company of paratroopers to take it over or destroy it. If a state steals sensitive information, treat it as if they or an agent walked into a government agency and stole it the old fashioned way, which would at the very least get a diplomat PNG'd. If it is something that would be considered an act of war if a person physically perpetrated the action, then it should be an act of war. Let them know that actions in "cyberspace" will have consequences in "meatspace".
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
That war will be fought in internet, and the innocent bystanders will be all of us, that in a way or another have some part of our lives here. No, won't be bullets, but privacy will dissapear (even pretending that you want it or try to give it to others could lead you to getting into political prosecutions), abuses of people in power will be common (like this, maybe more **AA oriented this time), forbidding not "government approved" encryption, software, technologies and so on.
Considering the investment on space exploration, Mars will be for long time the only "land of the free"
Today Obama called the new Chinese President, Xi Jinping, to congratulate him on his confirmation as head of state and chairman of the people's republic central military commission (he was already General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and chairman of the Party Central Military Commission). In that call, Obama made a point of addressing cyberattacks as one of the most prominent issues in their relationship.
It's no accident that two days earlier NSA Chief Keith Alexander "disclosed" to the House Armed Services Committee that the U.S. has offensive cyberwarfare capabilities, not just defensive capabilities.
I find it hard to believe that this is new information to the members of the Committee. The U.S. has had and used offensive cyberwarfare capabilities for years, even decades. The Internet itself arose from a DARPA project. The "disclosure" is a well-timed veiled threat meant to add teeth to Obama's diplomatic "congratulatory phone call" on his Chinese counterpart's first official day, in much the same way that China just used its congratulatory message to new Pope Francis on his first full day in office to warn him not to "meddle" in its affairs and that it hopes their relationship could be improved by cutting ties with Taiwan.
Neither one of these statements change anything. China knows the U.S. has had offensive capabilities for years, and will probably not alter its stance on cyberattacks. The Vatican knows China wants to appoint its own bishops who answer to the Party rather than the Pope, and it will probably not issue a statement saying that "God has decided that the Chinese Communist Party shall be his hand and mouthpiece for 12 million Chinese Catholics."
If anything, Obama is pleading with the new president to tone down the attacks and choose some less-conspicuous targets so he doesn't have to publicly come out against China. And the Chinese are pleading with the new Pope to tone down any statements he may make about China so they don't have to make his bishops disappear (Francis knows what it's like to live in a country where people are "disappeared" for political reasons, as in Argentina's "Dirty War" of the 1970s).
How does this statement make any sense?
'This is an offensive team that the Defense Department would use to defend the nation if it were attacked in cyberspace.'
Wouldn't that be a defensive team?
This shouldn't be that shocking. Congress authorized offensive cyberattacks in 2011. Remember? We talked about it: http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/12/23/1850209/us-congress-authorizes-offensive-use-of-cyberwarfare [Slashdot]
That aside, however, the US can only let itself get punched so many times before it hits back. The Chinese are doing a lot more than just probing our networks, and they've been doing these things for a long time now: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/04/wikileaks_cable.html [ Schneier on Security]
1984
That is all.
Sure, they keep claiming an "offensive capability" in order to keep the funding flowing, but they can neither target well, nor can they ensure the target is actually vulnerable. What they probably can do is damage civilian infrastructure. That will not impress an attacker and the claim that they can use this to "defend" the US is pure BS. Information attacks done under time pressure are like germ warfare to take out a very specific target: You never know whether your target may turn out to be immune and you will do massive collateral damage. It is no accident it is banned and heavily frowned upon.
The underlying problem is of course that those in power do not get it to any degree. They want an "offensive capability", so one is faked for them as huge cost. It may even have some use, but effective information attacks need a long, long time to be customized for the target and hence are not suitable for use in a war of any degree of dynamics.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
So which one is it? Offensive or defensive? Why is it that Americans can't seem to distinguish between the two? Here's a country whose "defensive" military is used entirely to bring war to foreign soil. The "Department of Defense" has not defended actual U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor.
Oh ! RDF ? Ah yes. The Rapid Deployment Force. The Pres. Jimmy Carter answer to the Iran 'threat' after elements of the USA DoD personnel aka 'armed forces' invaded Iran in response to the arrests of CIA, DoS and WH employees at the Embassy of Iran in Tehran on charges of spying and engaging in sabotage and other acts against humanity.
Ergo (not Argo) this one will fail like all the rest.
Where did you get the "million dollars per person"? $1K/person is a total loss of 100B.
I think we're in for a whole new Code War. I'm sorry - I just couldn't help myself.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
This looks ugly, but it seems the only possible scenario since defensive strategies are out of reach because of their cost (replace everything everywhere)
Sounds like they are pretty confident Linux systems will be busted. Has to be some kind of kernel exploit at a low TCP level. I doubt they expect hardened enemy servers to run any services beyond SSH/OpenVPN and TCPIP itself.
So my guess is those are vulnerable and specifically not to be trusted after hearing this announcement.
So what is the solution for a seriously targeted politically active geek (enemy of the state)? Perhaps build a limited TCPIP stack as a kernel module and run no services.
Instead of supporting odd network configurations, why not move back towards a smaller subset of the protocol? If you engineer the environment from scratch to be secure, why not engineer it a level further and set proper MTU's and disallow fragmenting altogether. Reject them outright. Force DF bit on all new connections. Remove the permissive features such as windowing/scaling and trusting the other side to properly tear down connections. Assume the other side won't properly shut it down, kill connections in odd states quickly, permit only a few half-open connections, etc.
We need a new stack with simplified mechanics without code from 1978. They've been finding holes. I'd say in BSD even. Don't trust that legacy code...... They are so proud of it now. They are dangerous.
Look at various pcap parsing tools that replay streams..... heck, they are 90% of what we need for something considered *seriously* secure. You know, the kind of secure where you remove features and piss off people by making them jump through hoops to communicate with you....
Security over convenience.... Remove the attack vectors that are obviously the most lucrative and easy to pwn. Maybe it's *not* as crazily secure as you think just because it's in use since the 70's.
Like the good ol' days in mother Russia:
Vladimir Vetrov
A few books and a French movie (also released in America), have been based loosely on his story.
Anyone can be seriously "offensive" in this business. All it takes is $100 laptop and msf.
Defense? That, my friends, is the multi-tens-of-billions industry we're in.
Cyber Command? Show me your defensive game and stop wasting my tax money.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Can you imagine it:
"The Cyber War is upon us from China, all US boundary routers are inactive"
"Quick, call the Cyber Defense Attack teams, get them to attack all the boundary routers in China"
There is a reason why the 9/11 terrorists chose planes and large, famous targets, rather than assassinate a few thousand ordinary citizens one at a time over a period of years.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Cyber-Range already here. Using VM, a complete simulated network in a rack.
A poor substitute, for the Chinese mass production of crackers, operating on like systems ie, RSA etc.
It seems the military has found an excuse not to recruit from hacker fests, and exercise on simulations months old.
Once Genode is done enough, we can start building secure systems that don't have the systemic weakness that comes from a default permissive paradigm.
Capability based security offers a way forward, up and out of this quagmire. We can just build systems that don't have holes, and eliminate cyber-war.
Cone of Silence.
Sure, the saying goes: if you want peace prepare for war.
Sort of like how the motto of your religion should be "if you want liberty, prepare for fascism". Except, of course, some people honestly believe that war can bring peace - while any thinking person could tell that your aims would bring only fascism and never liberty.
Disregarding Great Firewalls there are no borders nor anything close to one you moron!
You want 'offensive' 'cyber' 'weapons'? Just fire missiles into the datacenter. *sigh*.
Did you just make a hand-waving excuse for sensationalism? Why not join with those who believe, and have evidence to back up the belief, that rifle crime should be given low priority and that those pushing for rifle control are misguided/ignorant?
The saying is military propaganda. If you want peace, prepare for peace.
No, it's simple game theory. Let's say you decide to do away with your army or you defund it such that it is no longer capable. Your neighbor however decides to keep their army. Furthermore your neighbor is lead by a dictator who would really like to be your dictator too. Now that you no longer have an army you suddenly find yourself ruled by your neighbor who thought having an army was a fine idea. Maintaining an army (i.e. preparing for war) is simply an act of deterrence.
It's not about military propaganda. It's a recognition that there are people (and nation-states) in this world who will behave aggressively unless it is clear there is a credible opposition force. You ensure no one attacks you by proving you are not someone anyone wants to attack - in other words you prepare for war. Switzerland is a great example. They really have no apparent intention to attack anyone but the place is armed to the teeth just in case someone (like Germany) gets the idea they might want to attack Switzerland.
I agree. It's just another way for the federal government to justify stealing our money in the name of protection.
1a. pulling the plug to their router
1b. (And, because their traffic is interleaved) everybody's
2a. taking out their satellite. Or because they don't have one,
2b. taking out everybody's satellite
3a. assembling a target-specific pathogen and insert it
3b. spreads everywhere to everyone and creates chaos
4a. Denial of service flood attack
4b. Again, everybody's problem
5a. Centcom infiltrate websites with sock puppet and troll
5b. Oops, the Internet is already down, this should have been #1
I know the military likes to do cyber-stuff so they can be cyber-mean and cyber-modern and send cyber-letters on cyber-stationary and everything, but this sounds less like strategic warfare and more like some drunken nerd frat party, or a bunch of Luddites taking axes to looms in a garment factory. To destroy industry in order to save it.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
a military metaphor.
Our cyber security is alot like Vietnam. There is no frontline, you can't tell friend from foe, the enemy can blend right in with civilians instantly, civilian attacks are not acceptable, Intel is useless, and you can't tell who is pulling the strings until it is too late. Even worse, we are using the polish army approach to cyberwarfare, and are using antiquated equipment and techniques to attempt to fight, which will just get us routed. We don't even get the advantage of retreat or leaving the combat theater, as every attack could hit the homeland.
The US military is not prepared for this, and will need a paradigm shift to be any more then a big joke.