How the Code War Has Replaced the Cold War

An anonymous reader writes "After years on the defensive, governments are building their own offensive capabilities to deliver digital attacks against their enemies. It's all part of a secret arms race, where countries spend billions of dollars to create stockpiles of digital weapons and zero-day flaws. But is this making us any safer, or putting us and the internet at risk? 'Estonia is a small state with a population of just 1.3 million. However, it has a highly-developed online infrastructure, having invested heavily in e-government services, digital ID cards, and online banking. ... The attacks on Estonia were a turning point, proving that a digital bombardment could be used not just to derail a company or a website, but to attack a country. Since then, many nations have been scrambling to improve their digital defenses -- and their digital weapons. While the attacks on Estonia used relatively simple tools against a small target, bigger weapons are being built to take on some of the mightiest of targets.'"

Comments

Lots of challenges in dealing with this

[cold fjord]

Since they seem destined to exist I hope that the cyber weapons being built have adequate safeguards against their misuse or accidental use.

Cyber warfare is worse than submarine warfare in terms of being able to identify an attacker. It provides the means for potentially anonymous devastating attacks. How will the world react to that?

Cyber arms control will be difficult to achieve, at best, maybe impossible.

Will a "Cyber Geneva Convention" be needed? No attacking hospitals, etc.?

How will organized crime and black hats fit into this framework? Will they be in the new era what pirates were in the 1700s - 1800s?

Billions of dollars?

[c0d3g33k]

Stockpiles of exploits? Sounds like some reporter is out of his/her depth and can't understand the difference between physical weapon stockpiles and software vulnerabilities. Welcome to the new Yellow Journalism. FUD, FUD and more FUD.

Joke of a comparison

[timeOday]

If cyber "war" has replaced nuclear war then that is an excellent trade. Even John Kerry was waxing nostalgic for the Cold War the other day. What a joke! Are people that dumb? Have we so quickly forgotten what it was like to face a REAL threat of annihilation and actual global destruction? I would take another 9/11 over another Cuban Missile Crisis any day of the week. Let alone some computer hacking.

Re:Joke of a comparison

[Kjella]

Technically speaking, most of those nuclear weapons everyone was afraid of back then are still there, just waiting to be fired. Now, rather than the Soviet Union, they're in the hands of Russia. A least nothing is going on that might increase tensions between Russia and the rest of the world right? Oh, and fortunately Russia isn't run by some hard-right authoritarian, obsessesed with projecting strength.

The Soviet Union with half of Europe as allies was a superpower. Russia is barely in the top 10 biggest economies of the world, they have 140 million men against 900 million in NATO. Their military technology and spending suffered during the reforms, by all means they're powerful but they got no chance of pulling off a victory. Putin is gambling that nobody wants to pick a fight with Russia over a few areas in Ukraine, if he's called on it they'd lose but probably not before a hundred million people have died. Unless of course China were to join on the Russian side, 1.35 billion people and the world's second biggest economy along with Russia's nukes would give NATO a real run for their money. Personally I think what's happening in Ukraine will push all the other countries in the "buffer zone" between NATO and Russia to seek NATO membership over Russia's objections.

Re:If Goverment and Industry

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't adopting new technology, it is doing so focusing being as cheap as possible in the short term, and damn the long run.

In reality, I see at least six things that, had it been implemented earlier, would have saved us a lot of issues:

1: The concept of tainted instructions and having anything a Web browser grab be viewed as potentially hostile. This means add-ons are restricted to a sub-context and only can get keyboard input if they have the focus (and they have to be clicked on to have that happen), and the OS the Web browser sits on not just isolate its processes in memory, but also the file system. This way, there isn't an undocumented API a compromised browser or add-on could use to expand its context.

2: Moronic things like the USB protocol where a disk drive can present itself as a keyboard. It would be nice to have specific USB ports where only drives can register in one set, keyboards in another set, and so on.

3: The almighty firewall as the answer to all remote hacking. This worked when hacks were incoming, but now with the primary means of attack holes in Web browsers, the focus needs to be on add-ons and the browser, then defense in depth.

4: Backups got set aside. It wasn't that long ago when every serious PC had a tape drive with it because hard disks died, and tape was cheap, and worked well. Now that people think they can back up to hard disks (note, none I know of are archival grade), it is a matter of course to lose data.

5: Trusting other people with security. When people stopped packing their own parachutes, the shit hit the fan. If one wants to store stuff with an offshore provider, great. Just encrypt the damn files before they leave the site.

6: Final one... no security specs or audits whatsoever except for the US Government's FISMA compliance that can have random audits happen. Only time an audit happens in a lot of private companies is after a breach happens.

Re:good

[Calibax]

Instead of global thermonuclear war, we now have to worry about WoW going down. Seems like a good tradeoff to me.

Instead of WoW, worry about the national infrastructure. Imagine all the SCADA devices insecurely connected to the Internet going down more-or-less simultaneously. No electricity, natural gas, or water distribution systems, no sewage treatment, etc. After a few hours/days without electricity the backup systems would start dying, so no phones or Internet either.

So no WoW, as you pointed out. But that would be the least of our problems :)