Wired battlefield
Richard Clarke is a prophet of doom who has been sounding the alarm about a cyber-Apocalypse for more than a decade.
The former top counter-terrorism advisor for U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush envisions a scenario in which computer hackers simultaneously take down the Pentagon's computer networks; trigger explosions at oil refineries; release chlorine gas from chemical plants; disable air traffic control centres; cause trains and subways to collide; delete all the data on the computers of the U.S. Federal Reserve and major banks and then take down power grids, plunging the United States into darkness from coast to coast.
It's a vision of cyber war in which thousands die; cities run out of food; the world's finance system collapses and looters take to the streets.
"In all the wars America has fought, no nation has ever done this kind of damage to our cities," Mr. Clarke says. "But a sophisticated cyber war attack by one of several nation-states could do that today, in 15 minutes, without a single terrorist or soldier ever appearing in this country."
The age of cyber war has arrived. Nations are already secretly ramping up their online weapons, testing attack scenarios, hacking into computer networks and laying trap doors and logic bombs in crucial infrastructure networks around the world.
Last May, the United States officially designated cyberspace as the fifth sphere of war -- after land, sea, air and space -- and established a new U.S. Cyber Command, located in Fort Meade, Md.
The new military command, which becomes fully operational this month, is already preparing to quadruple the number of cyber warriors it employs to ward off computer attacks and conduct "full spectrum military cyberspace operations."
China, Russia, North Korea, Israel and France already have similar military cyber commands. A leaked FBI report earlier this year estimates China has developed an army of 180,000 cyber spies.
Next month in Lisbon, a NATO summit will discuss the feasibility of setting up a surveillance system for cyber attacks -- an Internet version of the early warning DEW Line radar network that protected North America during the Cold War.
NATO leaders may also debate whether to amend their collective defence pact to include cyberspace--effectively setting the stage for authorizing conventional military or cyber reprisal attacks for a computer attack on a member state.
The European Union also intends to hold a cyber security exercise across its 27-member states in November to test its preparedness for cyber warfare.
Early this month, Canada's Public Safety Minister Vic Toews unveiled a new five-year, $90-million program to develop a new cyber security strategy to protect Canadians from cyber threats. The government intends to focus on protecting its own computer systems, partnering with industry to strengthen security and to conduct general education programs in cyber-safety.
Britain, meanwhile, unveiled its harshest defence spending cuts since the Second World War this week while simultaneously deciding to pump an extra US$1-billion over four years into developing a new cyber security strategy. The move came after a national defence review listed terrorism and cyber attacks as Britain's two top security threats.
"There is already an arms race in cyberspace," said Ron Deibert, a telecommunications expert who runs the Citizen Lab research facility at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs. "There is a classic arms race dynamic going on right now, where countries are looking to each other basically from the perspective of fear," he said. "We are seeing a much more aggressive assertion of power into cyberspace, which really turns on its head the myth that many people have had concerning these technologies -- that they couldn't be controlled and governments would be left behind.
"The ecosystem of cyber crime and espionage has really exploded in recent years. It's going to present a problem for the domain as a whole. It's going to undermine all the benefits of openness that we have derived from it. If we think there is a connection between the Internet and other technologies and things like liberalization and democratization, those can be quickly reversed."
As daily lives move online, our dependence on the Internet has skyrocketed and the opportunities for digital predators have multiplied.
This summer, a cyber security conference in Washington was told that in any 20-second period, Internet users around the world will conduct 680,000 Google searches, send 88 million emails, post 140,000 updates on Facebook and process 12,000 electronic bank payments.
Not surprisingly, threats from crime and terrorism have increased exponentially as the Internet has revolutionized society.
"As the most wired nation on Earth, we offer the most targets of significance, yet our cyber defences are woefully lacking," said Mike Mc-Connell, a retired U.S. Vice Admiral and former director of National Intelligence during President George W. Bush's second term.
The United States faces the possibility of losing a cyber war, without ever knowing the identity of its adversary, Admiral McConnell told a U.S. Congressional hearing this summer.
"If an enemy disrupted our financial and accounting transactions, our equities and bond markets or our retail commerce -- or created confusion about the legitimacy of those transactions -- chaos would result," he said.
"Our power grids, air and ground transportation, telecommunications, and water-filtration systems are in jeopardy as well."
To defend against that possibility, Admiral McConnell has called for the creation of an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace, identify intrusions and locate the sources of potential attacks.
But he has also called for "re-engineering the Internet to make attribution, geolocation intelligence analysis and impact assessment -- who did it, from where, why and what was the result--more manageable."
Other experts have called for establishing a separate, independent Internet that would act as a "secure zone," where key government, financial and critical infrastructure systems can be shielded from the public Internet.
Earlier this year, U.S. Senators briefly considered and then rejected a clause in an Internet Security bill that would give the U.S. President extraordinary powers to flip a "kill switch" to close the Internet down entirely in a cyber emergency.
Still others are calling for a new international treaty, similar to the Geneva Conventions, which govern conventional military conflicts and protect non-combatants, to outline the rules of cyber war.
"Cyberspace is contested every day, every hour, every minute, every second," Iain Lobban, director of Britain's eavesdropping and encryption agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) said recently in his first-ever public speech.
"A Maginot line approach to defence will not be sufficient," he told the International Institute for Strategic Studies. "'Patch and pray' will not be enough. At the national level, getting the rest of cyber [defence] right will involve new technology, new partnerships, and investment in the right people."
"All the symptoms of what is going on here, whether it is talk of re-engineering the Internet, doing away with anonymity or 'kill switches' is part of a concerted effort by government to control this space for strategic military purposes," said Prof. Deibert. "It is a natural process, to some extent, as a threat calculation.
"The problem is, some of these policies risk throwing the baby out with the bath water. We could kill the ingenuity that most people associate with the economic progress that has come about with the Internet."
By Peter Goodspeed, National Post
pgoodspeed@nationalpost.com
SOURCE : http://www.nationalpost.com/news/world/Wired+battlefield/3715889/story.html
The former top counter-terrorism advisor for U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush envisions a scenario in which computer hackers simultaneously take down the Pentagon's computer networks; trigger explosions at oil refineries; release chlorine gas from chemical plants; disable air traffic control centres; cause trains and subways to collide; delete all the data on the computers of the U.S. Federal Reserve and major banks and then take down power grids, plunging the United States into darkness from coast to coast.
It's a vision of cyber war in which thousands die; cities run out of food; the world's finance system collapses and looters take to the streets.
"In all the wars America has fought, no nation has ever done this kind of damage to our cities," Mr. Clarke says. "But a sophisticated cyber war attack by one of several nation-states could do that today, in 15 minutes, without a single terrorist or soldier ever appearing in this country."
The age of cyber war has arrived. Nations are already secretly ramping up their online weapons, testing attack scenarios, hacking into computer networks and laying trap doors and logic bombs in crucial infrastructure networks around the world.
Last May, the United States officially designated cyberspace as the fifth sphere of war -- after land, sea, air and space -- and established a new U.S. Cyber Command, located in Fort Meade, Md.
The new military command, which becomes fully operational this month, is already preparing to quadruple the number of cyber warriors it employs to ward off computer attacks and conduct "full spectrum military cyberspace operations."
China, Russia, North Korea, Israel and France already have similar military cyber commands. A leaked FBI report earlier this year estimates China has developed an army of 180,000 cyber spies.
Next month in Lisbon, a NATO summit will discuss the feasibility of setting up a surveillance system for cyber attacks -- an Internet version of the early warning DEW Line radar network that protected North America during the Cold War.
NATO leaders may also debate whether to amend their collective defence pact to include cyberspace--effectively setting the stage for authorizing conventional military or cyber reprisal attacks for a computer attack on a member state.
The European Union also intends to hold a cyber security exercise across its 27-member states in November to test its preparedness for cyber warfare.
Early this month, Canada's Public Safety Minister Vic Toews unveiled a new five-year, $90-million program to develop a new cyber security strategy to protect Canadians from cyber threats. The government intends to focus on protecting its own computer systems, partnering with industry to strengthen security and to conduct general education programs in cyber-safety.
Britain, meanwhile, unveiled its harshest defence spending cuts since the Second World War this week while simultaneously deciding to pump an extra US$1-billion over four years into developing a new cyber security strategy. The move came after a national defence review listed terrorism and cyber attacks as Britain's two top security threats.
"There is already an arms race in cyberspace," said Ron Deibert, a telecommunications expert who runs the Citizen Lab research facility at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs. "There is a classic arms race dynamic going on right now, where countries are looking to each other basically from the perspective of fear," he said. "We are seeing a much more aggressive assertion of power into cyberspace, which really turns on its head the myth that many people have had concerning these technologies -- that they couldn't be controlled and governments would be left behind.
"The ecosystem of cyber crime and espionage has really exploded in recent years. It's going to present a problem for the domain as a whole. It's going to undermine all the benefits of openness that we have derived from it. If we think there is a connection between the Internet and other technologies and things like liberalization and democratization, those can be quickly reversed."
As daily lives move online, our dependence on the Internet has skyrocketed and the opportunities for digital predators have multiplied.
This summer, a cyber security conference in Washington was told that in any 20-second period, Internet users around the world will conduct 680,000 Google searches, send 88 million emails, post 140,000 updates on Facebook and process 12,000 electronic bank payments.
Not surprisingly, threats from crime and terrorism have increased exponentially as the Internet has revolutionized society.
"As the most wired nation on Earth, we offer the most targets of significance, yet our cyber defences are woefully lacking," said Mike Mc-Connell, a retired U.S. Vice Admiral and former director of National Intelligence during President George W. Bush's second term.
The United States faces the possibility of losing a cyber war, without ever knowing the identity of its adversary, Admiral McConnell told a U.S. Congressional hearing this summer.
"If an enemy disrupted our financial and accounting transactions, our equities and bond markets or our retail commerce -- or created confusion about the legitimacy of those transactions -- chaos would result," he said.
"Our power grids, air and ground transportation, telecommunications, and water-filtration systems are in jeopardy as well."
To defend against that possibility, Admiral McConnell has called for the creation of an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace, identify intrusions and locate the sources of potential attacks.
But he has also called for "re-engineering the Internet to make attribution, geolocation intelligence analysis and impact assessment -- who did it, from where, why and what was the result--more manageable."
Other experts have called for establishing a separate, independent Internet that would act as a "secure zone," where key government, financial and critical infrastructure systems can be shielded from the public Internet.
Earlier this year, U.S. Senators briefly considered and then rejected a clause in an Internet Security bill that would give the U.S. President extraordinary powers to flip a "kill switch" to close the Internet down entirely in a cyber emergency.
Still others are calling for a new international treaty, similar to the Geneva Conventions, which govern conventional military conflicts and protect non-combatants, to outline the rules of cyber war.
"Cyberspace is contested every day, every hour, every minute, every second," Iain Lobban, director of Britain's eavesdropping and encryption agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) said recently in his first-ever public speech.
"A Maginot line approach to defence will not be sufficient," he told the International Institute for Strategic Studies. "'Patch and pray' will not be enough. At the national level, getting the rest of cyber [defence] right will involve new technology, new partnerships, and investment in the right people."
"All the symptoms of what is going on here, whether it is talk of re-engineering the Internet, doing away with anonymity or 'kill switches' is part of a concerted effort by government to control this space for strategic military purposes," said Prof. Deibert. "It is a natural process, to some extent, as a threat calculation.
"The problem is, some of these policies risk throwing the baby out with the bath water. We could kill the ingenuity that most people associate with the economic progress that has come about with the Internet."
By Peter Goodspeed, National Post
pgoodspeed@nationalpost.com
SOURCE : http://www.nationalpost.com/news/world/Wired+battlefield/3715889/story.html
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