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."

Comments

Do it

[WindBourne]

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.

Re:Do it

[PopeRatzo]

Seriously, the west has been under attack from Russia, CHina, North Korea, Iran, Syria, and a few others, for the last 20 years.

Yes, but Russia only attacks us because they love freedom and want the USA to be strong and a shining example of democracy in the West, and not for any nefarious reasons. If you suggest otherwise, you should watch your ass.

Re:Do it

[whoever57]

VLAN. I do not think that word means what you think it means.

Re:Do it

[tindur]

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.

So let's start by attacking Canada and western Europe.

Re:Do it

[WindBourne]

attacks from Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran were going on LONG before Stuxnet.

Re:Do it

[Nkwe]

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.

You do understand that VLAN only offers security if you have complete control over the physical network? I suspect you may not because you mention using VLAN to isolate services that would typically be at significantly different physical locations and be administered by different people.

Using US made equipment would be a start, but the issue with VLAN is that if anyone has access to the configuration of anything touching a physical connection that is "protected" by VLAN, they can just change the configuration and you don't have isolation any more. All VLAN does is add a couple of bytes to the header of the packets and you *hope* that everyone listening honors those packets. It can really only be used within a physically trusted segment of your network *and* you have to trust everyone who can configure the related network gear. This means that if an attacker gets configuration access to any of your devices touching the VLAN trunk, they can alter the configuration and escalate their access. If you are using VLANs to isolate workstation access at the workstation NIC, well just don't.

In your example of using VLAN to isolate military, utilities, and banking, I would have to assume that you mean isolating them when they run across a common set of network links. This is an unlikely scenario because VLAN is a physical layer 2 (data link / Ethernet segment) thing and you typically would use a network layer 3 (routing / IP subnet) thing to deal with connecting disparate networks over distance. If you are actually talking about tying these entities together at the physical layer of the network, you would have to trust that the parties at both ends and everyone in the middle absolutely kept physical administrative control and that there were no bad actors in the mix. This is unlikely.

Other technologies, such as VPN would be more appropriate. This as well as regulations that require either air-gapping of sensitive systems or proven control of the encryption keys used to create VPN sessions running through shared networks.

Re:Do it

[serviscope_minor]

America is not and never has been a "Christian nation".

The constitution is the starting point to define the body of laws. It doesn't define the culture of the country. In practice, America (which explicily disallows the government from favuring a religion) is far more of a Christian nation than the UK (which has a state religion and that religion has some voting power in the Lords).

There's the legal aspect and then there's how people act. In the US, a lot of politicians fall over themselves to display their religious credentials, especially if they're on the whackjob fringe. In the UK for example, politicians on the whackjob fringe coughBlaircough keep it very, vey quiet.

Then there's the "one nation under god" pledge of allegiance. Frankly, I barely had that much religion at the C of E school I went to up until 11 (that is hyperbole by the way).

Anyway as a some-time resident of a few years, America seemed much much more Christian in practice than my homeland no matter what the constitution says.

On a Sunday the church car parks were always full. In the UK there's a serious problem with declining attendance which means that there's a real lack of funds to perform upkeep on important historic architecture.

But I digress. Even Donald Trump (who if nothing else, we can all agree is not a conventional politician) felt the need to advertise his Christian credentials during his campaign.

America might not be a Christian nation from a legal point of view, but from just about every other point of view it looks, feels and behaves like one.

What allies?

[Midnight Thunder]

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.

Involuntary pen testing needed.

[Gravis Zero]

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.

Re:Is water wet?

[currently_awake]

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.

This "war" was lost in the 1970s

[ka9dgx]

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(

US 'giving' ideas to NK, LoL

[TiggertheMad]

"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.

Re:Is water wet?

[BlueStrat]

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