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Re: Quick Review: Cyberwar as a Confidence Game by Martin C. Libicki
From: Marsh Ray <marsh () extendedsubset com>
Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2011 20:23:49 -0500
Go back in time to the second half of the 20th century: Is it the Cold War? ... Yeah, I suppose you could call it that. Is it World War III? ...No, I notice a distinct lack of me being vaporized. Both of these terms are useful, but one is more political and the other more usefully technical. My view is that we need a rather strict test for 'cyberwar' if it's going to be a term with any meaning. * Industrial and military espionage: not cyberwar * For-profit crime or extortion rackets: not cyberwar * Coordinated DoS attack on government, political, or social media websites: not cyberwar Based on wild speculation and unscientific extrapolation from public information, I suspect that when it really is cyberwar you won't find yourself in doubt. In the first 24-48 hours we might expect: * Banking networks and ATMs will go out. * Phone and internet will be severely degraded or down. * The power will become unreliable or go down entirely. * Traffic lights may go out, water may go out. * Malware which spreads wirelessly between every car of some very common model induces brake or accelerator failure, causing a massive number of nearly-simultaneous accidents which shut down major traffic routes. * Gas stations and grocery stores will be functioning on mostly cash and have minimal resupply. * People don't go to work. Financial exchanges dill not open. * Various industrial systems may be permanently damaged but you may not know the extent of it at the time unless they emit visible flames or other hazardous material. Together, these things sound like a bad made-for-TV movie about Y2K. But most of us on this list know that they are all technically plausible individually. These are the things that separate modern society from the third world. After a just a few days of this, densely populated areas will look like post-Katrina New Orleans or post-tsunami TÅhoku just without the soggy destroyed buildings. At this point, even the most restrained of nations will be going all-in with whatever kinetic response they can muster. Any distinction remaining between cyber- and non-cyber- war will seem ridiculously academic. But given the difficulty of rapid accurate attribution, the retaliating country may have to resort to picking some usual-suspect adversary almost at random and attempt to make him pay. (Notice how quick most are willing to accept the attribution of the Comodo CA compromise at face value because it appears to have been sourced from Iranian IP address space?) Post-Stux, most major nations are right now said to be allocating big-program military resources for offensive cyber capabilities, the result of which will likely be some cavernous command center with big screens on the wall and cyber-cadets tapping touch screens to click buttons on some PHP app which pwn preconfigured targets. But it seems like in many cases an accurate post-attack assessment will rely on the function of the same network systems that are disintegrating under attack. Obtaining real time feedback beyond "yep, it's off" will be difficult and will be further enhanced by any countermeasures and counterattacks the other party may deploy. So, much like in a nuclear war where a "use em or lose em" principle was expected to encourage rapid escalation, in a cyberwar the commander may soon find himself in a "use em _and_ lose em" scenario which eventually degrades to clicking on the attack buttons blind. So perhaps a true cyberwar is when the order is given to "push all the buttons", or the point at which it becomes a near-certain eventuality. Interestingly, this point may be obeservable only in retrospect. On 03/23/2011 02:37 PM, Yiorgos Adamopoulos wrote:
Oh but it gets better: If a cyber warfare action is an act of war, expect missiles pulling the plug in return. After all "cyber" is just another (the newest) dimension of battlespace.
Perhaps the inherent qualities of one kind of cyberwar are that it is low-level, very limited in scope, targets those with weak deterrent capability, and impossible to attribute with a high degree of confidence. This seems to fit the handful of observed events that are mostly agreed to represent real nation state cyber-conflict. Alternatively, it may be just the opening round of an all-out conflict. But if it starts cyber and finishes kinetic, it probably won't be remembered as a cyber-war any more than Iraq war I or II is remembered as an air campaign.
Which brings me to a question: If one physically takes out a datacenter, or its power suppliesr (all of them), or its connecting cables (all of them) and thus rendering it non existent in cyberspace, is this a cyber warfare action or a hybrid?
I bet someone refers to it as a "dynamic and evolving situation". :-) Probably wishful thinking on the part of the one planning such a retaliation. Big attacks don't have to come from big datacenters in the same way that big bombers have to take off from big runways. Any cyber-weapon buttons that still remain to be pushed when the command center goes dark will simply be pushed from backup locations or will have previously been armed for dead-man operation. Unfortunately, this may imply that mil-spec cyberweapons will require an effective dead-man capability. Given the reliability of complex software in general it raises the real possibility that such a conflict could start by accident and escalate almost all by itself. - Marsh _______________________________________________ Dailydave mailing list Dailydave () lists immunityinc com https://lists.immunityinc.com/mailman/listinfo/dailydave
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- Re: Quick Review: Cyberwar as a Confidence Game by Martin C. Libicki, (continued)
- Re: Quick Review: Cyberwar as a Confidence Game by Martin C. Libicki dave (Mar 25)
- Re: Quick Review: Cyberwar as a Confidence Game by Martin C. Libicki Michal Zalewski (Mar 25)
- Re: Quick Review: Cyberwar as a Confidence Game by Martin C. Libicki Dominique Brezinski (Mar 25)
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- Re: Quick Review: Cyberwar as a Confidence Game by Martin C. Libicki Dominique Brezinski (Mar 27)
- Re: Quick Review: Cyberwar as a Confidence Game by Martin C. Libicki Michal Zalewski (Mar 27)
- Re: Quick Review: Cyberwar as a Confidence Game by Martin C. Libicki Jim O'Gorman (Mar 27)
- Re: Quick Review: Cyberwar as a Confidence Game by Martin C. Libicki beenph (Mar 25)
- Re: Quick Review: Cyberwar as a Confidence Game by Martin C. Libicki Yiorgos Adamopoulos (Mar 25)
- Re: Quick Review: Cyberwar as a Confidence Game by Martin C. Libicki Nate Lawson (Mar 25)
- Re: Quick Review: Cyberwar as a Confidence Game by Martin C. Libicki Kevin Noble (Mar 25)
- Re: Quick Review: Cyberwar as a Confidence Game by Martin C. Libicki Marsh Ray (Mar 25)
- Re: Quick Review: Cyberwar as a Confidence Game by Martin C. Libicki Nate Lawson (Mar 25)
- Re: Quick Review: Cyberwar as a Confidence Game by Martin C. Libicki Miles Fidelman (Mar 27)
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- Re: Quick Review: Cyberwar as a Confidence Game by Martin C. Libicki delchi delchi (Mar 25)