Why Hackers Aren't Afraid of Us

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Keio University Distinguished Professor  
Tokyo Japan  Cell +81 ‭‭70  4490 7275‬‬

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: June 24, 2018 at 04:29:47 GMT+9
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Why Hackers Aren't Afraid of Us
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Why Hackers Aren’t Afraid of Us
> The United States has the most fearsome cyberweaponry on the planet, but we won’t use it for fear of what will come 
> next
> By David E. Sanger
> Jun 16 2018
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/16/sunday-review/why-hackers-arent-afraid-of-us.html>
>
> WASHINGTON — Ask finance ministers and central bankers around the world about their worst nightmare and the answer is 
> almost always the same: Sometime soon the North Koreans or the Russians will improve on the two huge cyberattacks 
> they pulled off last year. One temporarily crippled the British health care system and the other devastated Ukraine 
> before rippling across the world, disrupting shipping and shutting factories — a billion-dollar cyberattack the White 
> House called “the most destructive and costly in history.”
>
> The fact that no intelligence agency saw either attack coming — and that countries were so fumbling in their 
> responses — led a group of finance ministers to simulate a similar attack that shut down financial markets and froze 
> global transactions. By several accounts, it quickly spun into farce: No one wanted to admit how much damage could be 
> done or how helpless they would be to deter it.
>
> Cyberattacks have been around for two decades, appearing in plotlines from “Die Hard” movies to the new novel by Bill 
> Clinton and James Patterson. But in the real world, something has changed since 2008, when the United States and 
> Israel mounted the most sophisticated cyberattack in history on Iran’s nuclear program, temporarily crippling it in 
> hopes of forcing Iran to the bargaining table. (The two countries never acknowledged responsibility for the attack.)
>
> As President Barack Obama once feared, a cyberarms race of historic but hidden proportions has taken off. In less 
> than a decade, the sophistication of cyberweapons has so improved that many of the attacks that once shocked us — 
> like the denial-of-service attacks Iran mounted against Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and other banks in 2012, or 
> North Korea’s hacking of Sony in 2014 — look like tiny skirmishes compared with the daily cybercombat of today.
>
> Yet in this arms race, the United States has often been its own worst enemy. Because our government has been so 
> incompetent at protecting its highly sophisticated cyberweapons, those weapons have been stolen out of the electronic 
> vaults of the National Security Agency and the C.I.A. and shot right back at us. That’s what happened with the 
> WannaCry ransomware attack by North Korea last year, which used some of the sophisticated tools the N.S.A. had 
> developed. No wonder the agency has refused to admit that the weapons were made in America: It raised the game of its 
> attackers.
>
> Nuclear weapons are still the ultimate currency of national power, as the meeting between President Trump and Kim 
> Jong-un in Singapore last week showed. But they cannot be used without causing the end of human civilization — or at 
> least of a regime. So it’s no surprise that hackers working for North Korea, Iran’s mullahs, Vladimir V. Putin in 
> Russia and the People’s Liberation Army of China have all learned that the great advantage of cyberweapons is that 
> they are the opposite of a nuke: hard to detect, easy to deny and increasingly finely targeted. And therefore, 
> extraordinarily hard to deter.
>
> That is why cyberweapons have emerged as such effective tools for states of all sizes: a way to disrupt and exercise 
> power or influence without starting a shooting war. Cyberattacks have long been hard to stop because determining 
> where they come from takes time — and sometimes the mystery is never solved. But even as the United States has gotten 
> better at attributing attacks, its responses have failed to keep pace.
>
> Today cyberattackers believe there is almost no risk that the United States or any other power would retaliate with 
> significant sanctions, much less bombs, troops or even a counter cyberattack. And though Secretary of Defense Jim 
> Mattis has said the United States should be prepared to use nuclear weapons to deter a huge non-nuclear attack, 
> including using cyberweapons, against its electric grid and other infrastructure, most experts consider the threat 
> hollow.
>
> At his confirmation hearings in March to become director of the N.S.A. and commander of the United States Cyber 
> Command, Gen. Paul Nakasone was asked whether our adversaries think they will suffer if they strike us with 
> cyberweapons. “They don’t fear us,” General Nakasone replied.\\
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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