Dailydave mailing list archives
Re: Mojo
From: Mohammad Hosein <mhtajik () gmail com>
Date: Tue, 5 Nov 2013 15:41:14 -0600
since i am preparing a release of public version of a talk on IO i did a while ago perhaps now a good time to ask Qs regarding points in the second mail of this thread . - what international law defines war and its distinctions with espionage , sabotage , coups or revolutions ? i'd be thankful for a link to something of that nature covering stuff related to IO/IW - if stealing things , like a bunch of cc and paypal info off some dude's win8 with some 0day is a Crime , and if by taking the exactly same steps two adversaries hurt each other , say , one with stealing loc/addr/phone/residential data of a nuclear scientist later blessed with magnet bomblets and the other one , stealing codes to render some parts of a missile defense useless while blessing the same dude with waves of missiles AND none agrees on any mutually accepted convention on warfare and all happened unannounced , how that 0day and the steps to exfiltrate the data in a supposedly simple cyber-robbery and a secret struggle between two states who hates each other to the fullest could be classified as a "civilian ill-intended tool" or "stuff" or "something else" in our crime scenario while being looked as Cyber/Electronic Weapons in the other case ? - suppose we can combine as many T-P-H Bytes as possible on some data center out there , and sophisticated math and processing behind it , which could be of help to identify who coded a duqu-type framework and follow the dude right to the contractor and make a "attribution case" , at least good for embarrassment theaters nation-states love , which part of it is "unscientific" or "emotional" ? i totally agree with you and some other fellas on "The Source" not being a Weapon or even Ammunition . it is INTELLIGENCE . raw/analyzed/verified/outdated/deceptive/smelly/secret/actionable/useless/disinfo etc . not all parts of a battle , whether between two gangs in a robbery-gone-bad or two nation-state military are in the row with "Fire" and "Shooting" materials . some are of more delicate nature and do not show smoke and flames when a trigger pulled or button pushed , even if they were named "Flame" . -mh On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 12:16 PM, Dave Dittrich <dave.dittrich () gmail com>wrote:
Dave, With all due respect, I think the "cyberweapon" and "cyberwar" language needs to stop. I urge you to not promote it. This kind of sloppy rhetoric conflates war (which has clear definitions under international law) with espionage (or network exploitation) and worse, with crime. Stealing things is NOT war. Breaking into computers is NOT war. These are NOT weapons, unless they can clearly be shown to have similar effects to actual weapons. Calling DNA a "cyberweapon," as happened in a previous post, conflates information about biology with computer programs (is it not one) and use of that information with an act of war (it is NOT war.) Seriously, this is really hurting our cause by degrading a serious topic into unscientific, emotional, and in may cases entirely self-serving rhetoric, rather than a serious discussion of serious issues. Dave (D.) On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 1:53 PM, Dave Aitel <dave () immunityinc com> wrote:So what defines a Cyber Weapon is in some part of my mind, a certain Mojo. It's like the difference between a speech, and rhetoric. With the right rhetoric you can lift whole houses right off the ground. And the right cyber weapon can change the world. To put it into context is Robert Graham: http://blog.erratasec.com/2013/10/the-fifth-estate-consensual.html<http://blog.erratasec.com/2013/10/the-fifth-estate-consensual.html#.UmmFBPnkvz4> " But once he got the ball rolling, it started to take on a life of its own. That happens a lot on the Internet. " His claim (which is probably right) is that WikiLeaks is there to provide cover for Wikileaks-related hackers (aka, Assange himself) who had data they wanted to get out. But so what? It's genius and everyone else is probably wishing they'd thought of it first, but nobody at the time realized how powerful just dumping semi-organized data on the world in a way that could not be shut up could be. It's like we had Voice of America, but failed to translate that into the Internet world before some random Australian, and now we're all jealous and blindsided. A good cyberweapon has Mojo. It has a life of it's own. That's what makes them so unstoppable. -dave _______________________________________________ Dailydave mailing list Dailydave () lists immunityinc com https://lists.immunityinc.com/mailman/listinfo/dailydave-- Dave Dittrich dave.dittrich () gmail com _______________________________________________ Dailydave mailing list Dailydave () lists immunityinc com https://lists.immunityinc.com/mailman/listinfo/dailydave
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