Introduction to Cyber-Warfare - Proiect SEMPER FIDELIS

12 2. POLITICAL CYBER ATTACK COMES OF AGE IN 2007As discussed in Chapter 1, throughout the 1990s, it was unclear whether attacks against computersystems would constitute a serious political statement. The possibility of a group to carryout a massive, effective, and meaningful attack in order to achieve a political goal seemed remoteat that time. However, when Russian hackers decided to take a stand as the Estonian governmentmoved a Soviet-era statue of a Russian soldier, conventional wisdom shifted dramatically.Though there were instances of cyber warfareprior to 2007, the attacks against Estonia were largeenough in scale to garner worldwide attention—demonstrating to the global community thatcyber warfare would add a new dimension to international relations.In this chapter, we discuss how disruption of information infrastructure can pose a significantthreat and how relatively simple means such as denial of service attacks can be an effectivemethod to attack such. We explore denial of service, related techniques, and issues in thischapter as well as describe the 2007 cyber attacks against Estonia and the response.RELIANCE ON INFORMATION AS A VULNERABILITYEdward Waltz in Information Warfare describes the concept of the Global Information Infrastructure(GII), a service and network providing communications and control servicesworldwide. The GII would quickly and efficiently carry voice communications for phone systems,commercial data traffic, and would connect the intranets of large global organizationsvia virtual private networks. 1 The GII is an idealized concept of how humans will somedayshare information in a streamlined manner. Access to such an infrastructure would be essentialfor modern life. Today, this vision is not fully realized. However, the Internet is consideredby many as the current de facto GII. 2Access to and the availability of the Internet in today’s GII are essential for the function ofmany first-world services, such as banking, personal communications, and logistical coordination.Estonian government officials have compared denial of access to the GII to closing a nationssea ports. 3 Without access to the communications infrastructure, the ability for businessesto communicate and transfer data would be significantly impeded. For instance, business-tobusinesscommunication and logistical coordination are highly dependent on communication.Further, some businesses rely on network connectivity for their entire operation.Denial and disruption of the GII can then serve two powerful goals. First, it can cause areal-world disruption to the operations of businesses and governments. Second, it can alsoinvoke the feeling of weakness or vulnerability in the victim because their systems and livescan indeed be disrupted in this way. As discussed in Chapter 1, availability is a key aspect ofinformation assurance. Attacks that disrupt the availability of network and computing resourcesare commonly referred to as DoS attacks. 4RUDIMENTARY BUT EFFECTIVE: DENIAL OF SERVICEIf availability is important, the disruption and denial of availability become a powerful anddesirable capability to any adversary. Denial of service attacks, commonly abbreviated as DoSor sometimes simply “dos,” are a well-known form of aggression on the Internet. The essenceof a denial of service attack is to flood the target of the attack with an abnormally large amount