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

[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

[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.

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(