Good afternoon. Welcome to the International Cyber Conflicts class. Today we are going to talk about an important topic, the cyber warfare. We have spent the last two decades worrying about cyber crime, how people are coming in and stealing information and stealing financial resources. However, cyber crime has morphed into something much more insidious and potent that we need to pay attention to that is cyber warfare. Instead of individuals launching attacks on the internet for financial gain, countries are launching attacks on each other, or at least planning to launch attacks on each other, or preparing their strategies to launch attacks on each other for political gains and strategic leverage over one another. So after land, sea, air, and space, cyber is becoming the next frontier of conflict among countries.
The term cyberwar has been used to describe the nation states attacking each other via the internet. This is an important weapon in political conflicts, espionage and propaganda. It's very difficult to detect a priori and is often recognized only after significant damage has already been done.
Gaining offensive capability on the cyber battlefield figures prominently in the national strategies of many countries and is explicitly stated In the doctrines of several of them including China, Russia and the United States.
It is generally understood that they are laying the groundwork for potential cyber conflicts by hacking networks of adversaries and allies alike.
The cyber warfare incidents are increasing, not only among nation states but among terrorists, political and social organizations and cyber transnational groups nobody has control of. One early example of cyber warfare was the 1999 targeting of US government websites by suspected Chinese hackers in the aftermath of the accidental US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Cyber warfare, since then has advanced further. It has morphed. As of mid-2011, there have been several large nuisance attacks, but mainly nuisance attacks, such as website defacements and denial of service, or service disruptions with only occasional incidents of espionage and infrastructure probes. In rare cases, these attacks have caused large scale failures of public Internet. However they have not resulted in large scale injury, loss of life or destruction of property.
Future attacks would involve destruction of information and communication systems, the critical infrastructure and also enhance psychological operations or psycops or psyops as they are called.
Example
The cyber attacks on Estonia in 2007 and Georgia in 2008 are the part of conflict with Russia., hinted at the potential of cyber warfare.
The prospective crippling impact to the critical national infrastructure has established the role of cyber warfare in modern conflicts. Not only Is information flow disrupted, but we can also disable critical infrastructure like power, finance, and water supply.
Tools and Motivation
If you compare different modes of attacks on the internet, the tools and techniques for launching attacks in cyber warfare, are the same as in cyber war, cyber crime, or cyber terrorism or hacktivism. However, the motivation differs from more political objectives of cyber warfare to the significant financial incentives of today's cyber crime. In addition, the scale, intention, and consequences can be much more severe for cyberwarfare, because these attacks are much more planned. With many more resources, the nations are attacking each other.
One big fear is that in one of these national attacks it could result in a critical attack by the other country either deservedly or accidentally. The cyberwar landscape is complicated. There's several challenges involved. In data collection, analysis and attribution and in our understanding cyberwarfare incidents.
Analyzing Cyber Attacks
Analyzing cyber attacks follows several discrete steps, including attack detection, relevant data collection, chronology determination, damage assessment, identification and remediation of vulnerabilities, and attribution assignment. And each of these steps poses a special challenge. There are disparate sources of data. The privacy laws that make data acquisition difficult, the lack of cross-border treaties for data sharing, use of cloaking techniques to hide identity, and volatile data that can be erased if not gathered promptly. All of that makes tackling cyberwarfare extremely hard.
No comments:
Post a Comment