Introduction to Cyber-Warfare - Proiect SEMPER FIDELIS

IS CYBER WAR A CREDIBLE THREAT?3security. Further, cyber operations, in general, can aide other military operations such asintelligence gathering and information warfare. Hence, cyber warfare can potentially makeconventional conflict more potent as well. However, there are many that in the past havedisagreed with cyber war posing a serious risk to national security.About a decade ago, many analysts felt that cyber war was not a serious threat. In 2002,James Lewis of the Center of Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) dismissed cyber warfareas a serious threat—referring to cyber weapons as “weapons of mass annoyance.” a;2 Theidea of cyber war was further downplayed in 2004 by noted security expert Marcus Ranum,who refers to it as “hype” arguing that cyber war is not cost-effective and lacks high-levelexpertise. 3 Putting the analysis of Lewis and Ranum in context, their reports were createdat a time when cyber warfare was not known to be well practiced by nation states. Further,Ranum cites the late 1990s as a period of mass speculation in popular media about the merepossibilities of cyber war. Back then, actual acts of cyber warfare were insignificant. Withoutmajor, publically known incidents of cyber war, analysts such as Lewis and Ranum werequick to ask “why is this important”?However, in the decade since the term “weapons of mass annoyance” 4 was coined, therehave been numerous instances of cyber warfare that we view as significant threats to security.Here is a sampling of some of the operations described in this book.• In 2006, the armed group Hezbollah hijacked IP addresses in order to circumvent Israelshutting down its Web page during the July War (Chapter 4).• In 2007, the U.S. Department of Energy conducted an experiment that resulted in a realpower generator being destroyed by cyber attacks alone (Chapter 12).• In 2008, Russian cyber attacks against Georgia during the initial phases of its conventionaloperation prevented Georgian new media from reaching the rest of the world as Russianarmor formation entered the Caucasus nation (Chapter 3).• In 2008, the Iraqi militant group Kata’ib Hezbollah was successfully able to steal the videofeeds of Predator drones (Chapter 10).• In 2009, security researchers discovered that many Tibetan Government-in-Exile computersystems were hacked into and monitored (likely by the Chinese government) for periods aslong as 2 years (Chapter 7).• In 2010, the Stuxnet worm was discovered. The Iranian government later made statementsindicating that the worm had infected and caused damage to its Uranium EnrichmentFacilities (Chapter 13).• In 2010–2011, hacktivists from the group Anonymous played a major role in conductingDDoS attacks against government computers in various countries in the Middle East aspart of the “Arab Spring” (Chapter 6).These and other cyber events have changed the public discourse on the topic. EvenMarcus Ranum now seems to concede (at least partially)—particularly in the wake ofStuxnet. 5a Note that in the paper, Lewis attributes the term “weapons of mass annoyance” to Stewart Baker. However, itwas Lewis who assessed cyber war to not be a major threat to national security.