Cyber Warfare
The internet is an area engaged by every marketer across the world. Yet this space is also being touted as the battle ground for the next world war. How would this effect life and work as we know it? And what can we do about it?
As recently as last week US security experts traced a series of internet attacks on Google and others to two schools in mainland China. Both institutions flatly refute any involvement in the attacks and caution against any conclusion that Chinese colleges were training hackers, but America’s National Security Agency and others remain convinced that the culprits remain at large on campus.
Google claims the attacks were aimed at accessing the Gmail accounts of dissidents after dozens of Chinese, US and European human rights activists had their accounts ‘routinely accessed by third parties’ via phishing scams and malware. This affront prompted the search giant to warn it would stop censoring its search results, in defiance of the nascent superpower, a threat they have yet to carry out. It is the latest in a series of conflagrations which ought to serve as a wake up call to a world and populace sleepwalking through the potential perils of a technology centred society.
Online refuges of political discourse have also found themselves on the receiving end of numerous attacks in Iran with the religious state’s clerical rulers attempting to suppress the medium’s ability to mobilise opposition. Some 10million Iranians have obtained internet connections since trouble flared in contested elections, a third of the nation’s total, prompting a crackdown from the frightened government which has defaced opposition websites with an Iranian flag and AK-47 assault rifle and the message “Stop being agents for those who are safely in the US and are using you.”
A group calling itself the Iran Cyber Army, suspected of being a subsidiary of Iran’s revolutionary Guard, claimed responsibility for the attacks: the latest in a series which had previously brought down Twitter last December during a wave of anti government protests. Such incidents are symptomatic of a wider phoney war in this new Wild West with the sheriff sleeping on the job.
Ominously this looks set to escalate still further with the Iranian regime now threatening to shutdown Google’s Gmail system and set up an Iranian national email service. Such a set up would allow the regime to pry on messages with impunity.
Vulnerable
These threats are particularly acute due to the nature of our ‘just in time’ economy which leaves wider society vulnerable to attack, explains IT security specialist Chris Brown, director of EMEA Operations for Netwitness, who told The Drum: “It does raise the potential for serious disruption to the supply chain. If this was to occur in the build up to a traditional war this could have a serious impact on the ability of a nation to attain a ready state.”
Brown foresees a significant increase in state lead online assaults with traditional battles being augmented by online assaults. A foretaste of this was witnessed in Georgia when the Russians launched a denial of service attack against Twitter, Facebook and other social media websites.
Designed to prevent Georgians from communicating effectively, the weapons of choice deployed by the former cold war antagonists were spam email messages and compromised computer “bot nets” which bombarded sites with 100s of thousands of fake messages and hits. Once the server can no longer cope with the volume of requests, legitimate users are denied access.
It is feared such approaches could spill over into future wars between antagonistic nation states leading many analysts to turn their attentions from traditional flashpoints around the deserts of Arabia and the straits of Taiwan to focus upon a rather more ephemeral battleground; the invisible packets of information which fly in the air around us and flow through the ground beneath us.
Land, sea and air campaigns will be joined in future by the stateless ether as a first strike medium to launch attacks in support of conventional military operations. Brown spoke of how these threats are likely to materialise: “Given the very nature of the internet even a small nation could launch a global army of compromised machines to launch a potentially devastating attack on much larger nations. There is very little we can do to stop this.”
“Various nations are talking about setting up computer emergency response teams, but very little in the way of action and investment in monitoring and proactive protection is taking place.
“I’m a pessimist; governments are tightening their belts to anything that’s just a theoretical risk. I think there will be a devastating attack, critical infrastructure will be affected and that’s when people will wake up.
“The internet is pretty resilient, it was designed from the outset to be so... but it is not immune or infallible. We should be fearful and rightly so, the fabric of the internet is under almost constant attack or scrutiny by individuals intent on nefarious activity and by state level groups looking to gain advantage over an adversary.”
Pranks
Perhaps the most worrying sign of our vulnerability comes from seemingly innocuous pranks such as one Spanish wags infiltration of a government website, substituting a portrait of hapless Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero with mute clown Mr Bean.
Not all attacks are played for laughs however and less savoury antics include the more nuanced approach of one hacker with an axe to grind who broke into the innocuous sounding Edinburgh City Council’s Pentland Hills Regional Park website. The phantom malcontent went on to sow confusion amongst the local rambling fraternity by peppering four letter expletives and homophobic insults amidst doctored pages of walking guides.
Twitter users are not immune to illicit activity either with one hapless Labour MP, David Wright, facing a grilling from irate Tories after describing the Conservatives as “scum sucking pigs” in an ill advised Tweet. Later the parliamentarian claimed that his account had been hacked into by an unidentified virtual miscreant.
The breach begs the question however, if our political leaders can be subjected to such breaches is anyone safe? Brown says not: “If people want to target an organisation and gain access to a particular individuals PC, they will do it. If they don’t have the skills to do it themselves they will pay somebody on the internet. There are guns out there for hire that will get you the information you require be that for political or industrial gain.”
The internet as with revolutions before it has opened a Pandora’s Box of unforeseen consequences as forces beyond the comprehension of its creators are unleashed. What had been the last line of defence for societies in which traditional media are heavily censored is becoming the first line of attack for those with totalitarian overtures.