Oh man, the picture at right is brilliant.
That’s part of an excellent post on Wired‘s Threat Level blog, pointing out how silly the notion of “cyberwar” is:
In truth, U.S. network operators already deal with DDoS attacks of a similar, or greater, magnitude than the ones that hit Estonia. Peters argues that critical U.S. military networks and weapons systems could fall. Malware is getting pretty sophisticated, I’ll admit, but I’ve yet to see a bot that can send packets from the public internet to a classified, air gapped Air Force network. If it exists, it can also do your laundry and walk your dog.
Peters even cracks open the old chestnut about American facing an electronic “Pearl Harbor.” Cue Ricky Martin on your Rio and it could be 1999 all over again.
While cyberhawks fancy themselves Cassandras preaching to an oblivious world, dire predictions of a Red cyberdawn were widely accepted in the halls of power for years. Condaleeza Rice voiced concerns in March 2001; six months later, September 11 provided a grim reminder that America’s enemies prefer shedding blood over bytes.
As much fun as Wired’s cyberwar coverage provides (the ICBM chart depicts a fictional attack by China on Senate.gov intended to stop Congress from imposing new import tariffs), there are good reasons to reject the idea that timeout errors are an act of war.
If we cast computer attacks in military terms, we invite military thinking where defensive technical solutions are needed. You can see the outline of where this is headed in the magazine. Peters, a former Army intelligence officer, writes not a word in support of the many serious efforts to close vulnerabilities in civilian and military networks. But he laments that in an age of cyberwar, America is burdened by “our own insistence of confining all forms of warfare within antiquated laws.”
We see it in Estonia too. While cooler heads were combating the first wave of Estonia’s DDoS attacks with packet filters, we learn, the country’s defense minister was contemplating invoking NATO Article 5, which considers an “armed attack” against any NATO country to be an attack against all. That might have obliged the U.S. and other signatories to go to war with Russia, if anyone was silly enough to take it seriously.
As I’ve said before “cyberwar” is petty vandalism, not terrorism and certainly not an act of war.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.