Financial Cryptography

Finally, the media gets it: The cyber-jihad that the NSA bought to hometown America

I have struggled to write this story for a long time, and now Business Insider has written it for us:

In a world where you can watch cyberattacks happen in real-time, it's no wonder that nation-states are doing little to hide the cyber arms race and low-grade cyberwar that's taking place. However, what's surprising is that the country leading the charge — the U.S. — may also be the one with the most to lose.

"There is a world of bytes and a world of atoms, and increasingly the world of bytes is driving the world of atoms," Dr. Jarno Limnell, director of cyber security at Stonesoft, told us. "This is a whole new capability for these state-actors — previously there was no way to touch the U.S."

(fast forward to the crux of the issue)

Capabilities vary. China, which began its Information Warfare (IW) plan in 1995, has been stealing America's business secrets for more than a decade. Russia recently stated that it's "not making a secret of their plans to gain offensive [cyber] technologies."

The U.S. isn't in the best position to invite cyberwar. As RedSeal Chief Technology Officer Dr. Mike Lloyd told us when he described how easy it would be to attack the physical U.S. infrastructure: "People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. [And] unfortunately, it's not just that—very simple stones can break our glass windows. We have very thin defenses."

OK, I'll spell it out - the USA has the most developed computer base of all countries, and is also the most attractive target. It is also as badly defended as anyone else, and may be the worst. E.g., it is the home of phishing, DDOS, breaching, and BotNet nodes. In particular, the record of breaches and phishing suggest that the USA is the country that was most at risk and had most losses from these attacks. (Question for all - Europe missed out on phishing, Russia got Kaspersky - why did USA get the worst of it?)

So in this environment, what is the Pentagon thinking? Good question. Here's an example of what the Pentagon is thinking:

The big question is whether a cyberattack can trigger a "real world" attack. Last year the Pentagon concluded that cyberattacks would justify a traditional military response. And in August BBC reported on a leaked Israeli memo that spelled out the hybrid use of cyber and military warfare in a proposed assault on Iran.

"This is the most troubling aspect of developing these weapons," said Limnell. "What is the action of the president if an attack happens, does it immediately become kinetic?"

Limnell said the difference between traditional warfare and cyberwarfare is that often cyberwarfare includes, indeed even prioritizes, civilian targets. And like the situation with the nuclear weapons in the 50s and 60s, there are no international rules for how we can use these weapons.

"Cyberwarfare is like Wild West right now, there’s a huge lack of norms and rules," Limnell said. "We will experience some type of major problem before we learn how to use weapons in the cyber domain."

Dumb. We already know that cyber attacks are mostly unattributable - the Chinese have been spying using these techniques for decades and China has not been caught. We now know the Pentagon generals are justifying their position by saying "it's cool, we'll just go kinetic if they dare throw a packet our way."

Dumber. So who do they throw their bombs at? Other than a country, their stuck - they have to go to the world and say "bad Iranians hurt us with packets, now we want to bomb them back into the stone age." That doesn't work, because the world saw the Iraqi debacle and won't play stupid again, but it seems that the Pentagon didn't get the memo. Worse - their casus belli is already known to be outright fraud because the USA has admitted launching StuxNet against the Iranians.

Can it possibly get any dumber?

The U.S. isn't in the best position to invite cyberwar. As RedSeal Chief Technology Officer Dr. Mike Lloyd told us when he described how easy it would be to attack the physical U.S. infrastructure: "People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. [And] unfortunately, it's not just that—very simple stones can break our glass windows. We have very thin defenses."

Oh yeah -- it gets leveraged dumb. It's because the equation is stacked against the USA. The Pentagon have launched what is probably the dumbest attack of all time. The Stuxnet attack that they might see as an exchange of a pawn, letting their kinetic queen rove free, is actually exposing their entire board. Dumbest of all.

The reason for this is politely called the equity question in NSA circles. When it came to cyber defence, the NSA decided in the early 1990s that it was more important to make the Internet weak and vulnerable to spying, than to let the Internet be able to defend itself. This decision was prosecuted publically through crypto export regulations -- remember the crypto wars -- but also through a host of other interventions into the IETF, corporates, critical infrastructure (to them) and other places. When thinking about why USA banking suffered the brunt of phishing and breach losses, a large part of the big picture goes back to the NSA.

So the biggest dumb mistake of them all is that the Pentagon wants any excuse to go kinetic against the Iranians, but they've not defended their home ground over the last 20 years. The gates to the cyber-kingdom are not only wide open, they're 6 inches high and guarding a line of warning signs.