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America's 'CyberWar' With Foreign Governments Could Get More Aggressive (wral.com)
America's Department of Defense "has quietly empowered the United States Cyber Command to take a far more aggressive approach to defending the nation against cyberattacks, a shift in strategy that could increase the risk of conflict with the foreign states that sponsor malicious hacking groups," reports the New York Times. Long-time Slashdot reader TheSauce shares their report:
In the spring, as the Pentagon elevated the command's status, it opened the door to nearly daily raids on foreign networks, seeking to disable cyberweapons before they can be unleashed, according to strategy documents and military and intelligence officials... The new strategy envisions constant, disruptive "short of war" activities in foreign computer networks... "Continuous engagement imposes tactical friction and strategic costs on our adversaries, compelling them to shift resources to defense and reduce attacks"...
The risks of escalation -- of U.S. action in foreign networks leading to retaliatory strikes against U.S. banks, dams, financial markets or communications networks -- are considerable, according to current and former officials... The chief risk is that the internet becomes a battleground of all-against-all, as nations not only place "implants" in the networks of their adversaries -- something the United States, China, Russia, Iran and North Korea have done with varying levels of sophistication -- but also begin to engage in daily attack and counterattack.
An article shared by schwit1 notes that officials in the Obama administration "were also worried that a vigorous cyber response...could escalate into a full scale cyber war."
Yet the Times reports that this new policy reflects "a widespread view that the United States has mounted an inadequate defense against the rising number of attacks aimed at America."
The risks of escalation -- of U.S. action in foreign networks leading to retaliatory strikes against U.S. banks, dams, financial markets or communications networks -- are considerable, according to current and former officials... The chief risk is that the internet becomes a battleground of all-against-all, as nations not only place "implants" in the networks of their adversaries -- something the United States, China, Russia, Iran and North Korea have done with varying levels of sophistication -- but also begin to engage in daily attack and counterattack.
An article shared by schwit1 notes that officials in the Obama administration "were also worried that a vigorous cyber response...could escalate into a full scale cyber war."
Yet the Times reports that this new policy reflects "a widespread view that the United States has mounted an inadequate defense against the rising number of attacks aimed at America."
They're not really a "foreign" government now, more like a good buddy
Seriously, the west has been under attack from Russia, CHina, North Korea, Iran, Syria, and a few others, for the last 20 years. We have been in a defensive posture, and losing badly.
It is high time to do the right things and first off strengthen our telecommunications network. We should be running vlan on equipment that is made ONLY in the west. Utilities should be on 1 vlan, and with absolutely NO CROSS-OVER. Likewise, MIlitary/Intelligence should be on one, Roads on another, banks on another (used only for transfers between banks), etc, etc. Regardless, the internet/gen comm absolutely should be on a different vlan from the rest of this.
And above all, we need to stop offshoring of access to those vlans, as well as making sure that telcos techs have security checks. The idea that ATT is outsourcing access to their internal network to India and CHina is nothing less than amazing.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
wrong. It is NOT apparent. NSA is doing their jobs. They absolutely DO lock down systems. The problem is that W split the work between NSA and DHS, which was stupid. DHS has done a HORRIBLE job. And the fact that you do not understand what is happening speaks of how poorly our tech world is doing.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Perpetrated by cave-men that think the only valid response to anything is to apply violence. The actual facts are that attribution is basically impossible and that you have an extremely high chance to hit the wrong target and that will obviously make matters worse, not better. There is even an attack-technique were you let some aggressive but brain-dead actor do your dirty work by faking an attack from the intended victim. So far this did usually not work because nobody was actually stupid enough to try an offensive "defense", but of we get that stupidity now, we will see these attacks. What is needed instead is that the utterly laughable level of defense prevalent in most businesses need to finally be brought so something that actually qualifies as defense. Hacking is a lot of work and hacking a reasonably defended enemy is economically non-viable. What is also needed is that DDoS for hire, bot-nets and the like get shut down fast and in coordinated actions, but that is law enforcement, not war. Might require some international treaties and collaboration, and the US currently seems to have forgotten the very high value of those.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Once upon a time the US was an ally many nations wanted to have (discounting the relationships fostered by the CIA). Today, the image of the US is one of isolationism and paranoia, very much in the frame of the leader.
Granted, it is hard to tell what is due to the commander in chief and what is simply politics as usual? It is also hard tell who is creating more spin?
Whatever happens the next leader needs to heal the wounds and divisions created by Trump (he already started during Obamaâ(TM)s terms), but that wonâ(TM)t be easy while Trump is still respected by his base. It also wonâ(TM)t be easy while the Democrats donâ(TM)t listen to the nation.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
If there is going to be any real defense of our critical systems then what we actually need is to have our own government bringing down vulnerable systems. Allowing these systems to continue to function when they could fail at any moment is like building on a fractured foundation: it's a disaster waiting to happen.
This effort will cause annoying outages but it will also force companies to invest in real security while allowing those who already have will thrive. Most companies have been complacent for far too long and it's made us very vulnerable.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
... than what?
We hear about Russia, China, Ukraine ...
What has the US ever done?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
... can't get rid of Kaspersky.
US Government Can't Get Controversial Kaspersky Lab Software Off Its Networks
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
There should be 1 government organization responsible for computer security, and they should not also be in charge of spying as that deters foreign governments and corporations from fully cooperating with them. Giving them legal authority to force companies to patch security holes would also help.
Ambient Authority is a design decision which only appears once you have multiple users sharing a computer. As a result, everyone just kept using it without much thought... until we find ourselves in a world of persistent networks, mobile code, no system administrators, and multiple layers of firmware and OS from various hardware and software vendors.
In such a system, any code runs with the full authority of the user who started the task, and the users have no effective means of limiting the side effects of running a given program. This in turn means we have to try to guess the intent of code (which is equivalent to solving the halting problem, and is thus impossible). The band-aid is to then try to enumerate all the bad code in the world (virus scanners), and to enumerate all the code bugs in all our programs (security updates), and to eliminate the trust of users (DRM, forced updates, "safety" filters in our browsers). None of these band-aids will work against a determined individual, let alone a nation-state.
Running tasks with the least possible privilege, the "Principle of Least Authority" (POLA) allows a user in such a system to decide ahead of time exactly what files the program is allowed to read, write, etc. Because we're all used to dialog boxes, and drag to drop GUI elements, this doesn't even require any special training of users to accomplish.
Of course, rebuilding our infrastructure to fix a design flaw of the size and scope of using 2 digit years (the Y2K problem we once faced), isn't going to be easy... especially when there's no deadline to make the need for action obvious. It's just going to remain an insidious vulnerability instead for decades to come.
If you think EAL certifications address this, they don't. 8(
FTFY. For christsake you spend more than the rest of the world combined, so stop being a tough guy crybaby.
"Stuxnet was a game-changer because it opened people's eyes to the fact that a cyber event can actually result in physical damage," says Mark Weatherford, deputy undersecretary for cybersecurity in the National Protection Programs Directorate at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
...and this guy was a stupid tool if he didn't realize this sooner. There were viruses back in the 1980s that could cause physical damage to computers by parking the head on a spinning platter of a hard disk, or wrecking the monitor by setting the refresh rate to an unsupported value. And those sorts of things could be done to a computer that WASN'T hooked up to a uranium centrafuge.
Stuxnet might have opened the eyes up of the uninformed desk clowns, but programmers and security people knew this for decades.
The US didn't open this can of worms...it is hubris to think that every country in the world doesn't have smart people in intelligence working these sorts of plans 24/7. If Stuxnet wasn't done by the US / Israel / whoever did it, someone else would have in fairly short order. The Russians were meddling in US elections via the internet because nobody had tried it before. NK attacked Sony Pictures. EVERYBODY is experimenting right now to see what you can get away with before you catch a retaliatory nuke.
Furthermore, this is the tip of the iceberg. There are plenty more operations being run by ALL nation actors to steal, hack, destroy enemy information and infrastructure right now. Nobody is talking about it, because it is bad spy craft to talk about what you do and do not know. It cost pennys on the dollar to hack when you compare that with conventional military operations.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.
The US has looked over its OPM files to find people who can fill its new Cyber Command from all sections of the US mil/gov and its many contractors.
After sorting for the optics of demographics and considering equality of outcome a new US command was created.
Fill in a questionnaire, pass the biographical screening and become a cyber expert.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
There should be 1 government organization responsible for computer security, and they should not also be in charge of spying as that deters foreign governments and corporations from fully cooperating with them. Giving them legal authority to force companies to patch security holes would also help.
Not only authority to legally order large software companies to patch security holes, but prosecute them for some form of criminal negligence when they do things like marketing routers with hard-coded default admin/vendor-access passwords (and especially for not mentioning that little detail very plainly to potential buyers). That sort of nonsense is not just ignoring security or even doing it badly, it's giving the entire concept of security the "Bronx cheer" and causes great financial and societal harm that affects everyone including people who are not their customers.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
The idea is that it is foolish to have a single producer of CPU, OS, components.
Think about it: Where is all the Win 10 telemetry going ?
How many "conveniente bugs" do a modern CPU have ?
How many ways are there (that we do not know) to "shutdown" a network infrastructure ?
By having country level perople and experts you also enhance the employment...
What can you wish more ?
"the Pentagon elevated the command's status, it opened the door to nearly daily raids on foreign networks, seeking to disable cyberweapons before they can be unleashed"
All the Pentagon has to do is stop running their infrastructure on Microsoft Windows.
The Pentagon is trying to CyberAttack our way to a more secure future. But Security comes from Defense, not attack.
Thousands of years of human experience have shown that destruction is easier than creation. One man can quickly destroy something that takes a community months to create. It may be that "To every thing there is a season; and a time for every purpose under heaven." But, if you don't spend more time on creation than destruction, you end up a lonely, starving scavenger. Any stable, prosperous society must provide more rewards for creation then destruction.
Modern economies of manufacture and transportation have made many things better, but this is not one of them. In almost every way, the modern economy favors attack:
The Internet has made many things better, but this is not one of them. In almost every way, the Internet favors attack over defense:
The transition to digital has made many things better, but, again, this is not one of them. In almost every way, being able to make effortless, accurate copies favors attack:
The reality is, Internet attack is like poisoning a common watershed, and hoping that your enemy dies first. There is no "Win" in "CyberWar". We all have to defend the same stuff. Every successful attack weakens us all.
We have a fairly clear understanding of how to increase security through defense. Almost every Internet Security expert agrees on the general shape of the necessary changes. But, the changes are HARD and EXPENSIVE. So, we keep hauling out the "Security Through Destruction" fantasy. If we were really serious about improving Defense, we would make changes like:
There should be 1 government organization responsible for computer security, and they should not also be in charge of spying as that deters foreign governments and corporations from fully cooperating with them. Giving them legal authority to force companies to patch security holes would also help.
The NSA has poisoned that well for the entire US government with the aid of the FBI and Congress. They even managed to smear NIST. Nobody should be cooperating with them.
Not only authority to legally order large software companies to patch security holes, but prosecute them for some form of criminal negligence when they do things like marketing routers with hard-coded default admin/vendor-access passwords (and especially for not mentioning that little detail very plainly to potential buyers).
Who do they prosecute when another government agency either pays or orders exploits to be designed in?
Well, since we're "wish-listing" here as it's unlikely in the extreme that any of this unconstitutional behavior will see any serious repercussions anytime soon, I'd like to see every single government official, agent, etc etc, face prosecution that originated the orders to violate civil rights and those down the chain that followed them.
When your government officials and agencies become "too big to prosecute" it might be a sign that your government has grown far too large & powerful.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
The NSA is a foreign intelligence gathering agency. They're not allowed to have domestic operations. The DHS and FBI handle that.
If we're going to hit back out of the fear that the people attacking us will be mad about it (as if we aren't), why bother defending ourselves at all?
Obviously, u do not work in intelligence. The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence. The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collection, and processing of information and data for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes, specializing in a discipline known as signals intelligence (SIGINT). The NSA is also tasked with the protection of U.S. communications networks and information systems.[8][9] The NSA relies on a variety of measures to accomplish its mission, the majority of which are clandestine.[10]
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Ppl really do not realize that nsa really are the good guys. For example, they have gone to great lengths to lock down linux, without putting in backdoors. In addition, when they find openings in Windows and apple, they exploit them UNLESS, they become aware that somebody.elsr knows about it. Then they tell the companies . keep in mind that nsa has dual conflicting purposes, so they try hard to make it work.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.