Introduction to Cyber-Warfare - Proiect SEMPER FIDELIS

xivINTRODUCTIONIt is 2012. In the United Kingdom, severalsenior British military officers receive aFacebook friend request from the NATOcommander—their boss. 6 Wanting to be ongood terms with one of the most senior militaryofficers in Europe, they click “accept therequest” providing their new “friend” withaccess to their personal profiles and communication—onlyto find out a few days laterthat the request was a hoax and they unwittinglyexposed their private profile data to anunknown third party.In recent years, the authors of this bookhave become fascinated with the idea of cyberwar. From the Russian invasion of Georgiato the employment of Stuxnet and Duqu,the hacking of Tibetan exiles by GhostNet,to the international cyber-espionage ringknown as the Shadow Network and others,cyber war has moved to the forefront of manynational agendas. In trying to wrap our headsaround this fascinating new dimension ofwarfare, we examined the available literature.Much seemed to be a re-hash of informationassurance—covering important, but alreadywell-documented, topics in computer networksecurity. Other work seems to take amuch broader view of the topic—exploringcyber warfare from a high-level policyview—discussing the possibilities of legalaccountability and the effects on internationalrelations. While works of these types are useful,they are not addressing cyber war froman operational and tactical perspective.We wanted to understand how cyber warwas currently being conducted, what typeof cyber operations seemed to be useful ina conflict, and under what circumstancesnation-states and nonstate actors engagedin these operations. We wanted to go beyondinformation assurance, without marginalizingits importance. Cyber warfare is morethan just information assurance and morethan just policy. In this book, we make aneffort to highlight military, sociological, andscientific aspects of cyber war as well. It turnsout that all of these factors significantly affecthow cyber warfare is conducted. None ofthe existing literature adequately explorescyber war in this way.In analogy to the way military art is beingtaught at the U.S. Military Academy, thestructure of this book is centered on casestudies. At West Point, military art is exploredthrough actual historical battles andwars rather than through weapon systems.Hence, we wanted to explore what werethe major actions of the cyber conflict; underwhat circumstances did they occur; and whattactics, techniques, and procedures wereused. In our representation of the case studies,we relied solely on open sources—specifically reports of computer securityfirms, academic journal and conference papers,and media reports. As cyber warfareis inherently linked to the evolution of scienceand technology, we included severalscientific experiments among our case studies.These experiments (particularly “RobinSage” and the DoE “Aurora Test” found inChapters 9 and 12, respectively) wereconducted under such conditions that theirreal-world replicability is apparent. Further,throughout the book, we often comment onscientific developments that, when consideredin conjunction with the incidents in agiven case study, lead to important considerationsfor the future. Additionally, it has recentlybeen noted that many majorcorporations desire a more “military style”approach to cyber security. 7 This book isbased on such an approach.We also look at military, sociological, andpolicy implications of the various case studieswe present. For instance, militarily, wediscuss how the targeting process is leveragedin cyber espionage in Chapter 7 as wellas how intelligence gathering plays a keyrole in cyber operations in Chapter 13. Weperform an in-depth description of the