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WWW.READMETRO.COM MARCH 2019
Is a cyberwar possible?
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The fear of cyberwar is growing. Metro investigates if a digital battle could happen in the nearest future. DANIEL CASILLAS
Metro World News
Internet is one of the most popular and useful tools, and the number of its users worldwide continues to grow every second. For many, it has become irreparable, and they cannot imagine their life without it. However, this virtual space is converting into new military battlefield. According to experts such as Tarah Wheeler, an information security researcher and political scientist, Internet has already become ‘fifth battlefield’, after land, sea, air and space. And it might be the largest of all, because of the number of people using it. According to the Global Digital Report by We Are Social and Hootsuite, number of Internet users in 2018 reached 4b+, 7 per cent more than in 2017. That means
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examples of major cyberattacks, according to experts
around 40 per cent of the world’s population is connected and participates in whatever happens on the web. Specialists agree that there is yet no cyberwar, but some series of cyber attacks, which cause virtual and even physical damage. “Significant cyberattacks and incidents can threaten national security, but this does not necessarily mean that they qualify as an act of war. The U.S. government, for example, holds that a cyberattack would have to ‘proximately result in death, injury or significant destruction’ to qualify as an act of war. The fact is that, so far, we have not witnessed cyberwar. This is why many experts now prefer to talk about cyber conflict,” Damien Van Puyvelde, lecturer in intelligence and international security at University of Glasgow, the UK, explained to Metro.
Attack on infrastructure in Ukraine “In December 2015, some 225k Ukrainians were left without electricity when hackers disabled 15 electric substations and backup power supplies. The attackers first conducted a phishing attack to lodge an all-purpose Trojan known as BlackEnergy in the computer systems of specific Ukrainian power companies,” Damien Van Puyvelde, lecturer in intelligence and international security at University of Glasgow, the UK, said.
However, the growing presence of cyberattacks and the possibility that they could lead to a war, cause concerns among cybersecurity experts and governments. For example, Russia has a project that could temporarily disconnect the country from the Internet. “An actual ‘cyberwar,’ in which digital weapons could be used to create physical damage is a growing risk, as we put more and more off our world’s operations online, from transportation networks and power grids to the appliances in your kitchen,” Peter Warren Singer, author of ‘LikeWar’ and ‘Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know,’ said. The issue of cyberwar also concerns China and the U.S. Since 2015, China has included in its military strategy actions for the development of a cyber force and improvement of cyber defence. While the Pentagon’s nuclear strategy presented last year contemplates the use of nuclear weapons to respond to a cyber attack on U.S. infrastructures. Experts believe that
Attack on nuclear plan “Take the Stuxnet worm attack back in 2010, when a joint U.S. and Israeli operation injected a virus into the systems that controlled the centrifuges at the Natanz nuclear plant in Iran – causing them to overheat, and destroy themselves. This dramatically slowed down the Iranian production of enriched uranium used in nuclear weapons,” Winder commented.
Attacks on social media “Social media are being exploited by nation states. Everything from the U.S. presidential elections to Brexit can be, and were, targeted by the Russian use of social media,” Davey Winder, journalist and specialist in cybersecurity, explained.
although China and Russia have outstanding offensive cyber capabilities, Western countries such as the U.S. and the UK are better prepared for a possible cyber conflict. “The west, in particular the U.S. and to a lesser extent the UK, are prepared for such an event. And while they might not be overtly aggressive in their cyber operations that we know about, in a time of war things would likely be swayed to the west having a better defensive capability to protect critical national infrastructure from attack,” Davey Winder, journalist and specialist in cybersecurity, stated. Although the danger of a cyberwar still seems distant, there is a possibility that common users of the network may be affected by digital attacks in the absence of regulations. “The danger is that this space is still loosely regulated on both the global and business level,” Warren Singer concluded. “The security of the devices in your home is still far below where they need to be.”
Attack on electoral process “According to a declassified U.S. intelligence community report, President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign targeting the 2016 U.S. presidential election. This campaign sought to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process and harm Secretary Clinton’s electability. The U.S. intelligence community assesses that the Russian services consider their cyber-enabled disclosure operation as a ‘qualified success’ because of its impact on public discussion in the United States,” Van Puyvelde stated.
Q&A PETER WARREN SINGER,
author of ‘LikeWar’ and ‘Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know’
What is a cyberwar? Like word “war” itself, “cyberwar” is a highly contested term. It means various different things to different people. But essentially, it comes down to the idea of using computer networks to carry out acts that would meet the definition of war, combining politics and violence. Is there an ongoing cyberwar? Often, in talking about “cyberwar,” people blend together all types of actions that might not meet the traditional definition of a direct “war,” but are more akin to a state of conflict, like how the Cold War was a conflict back and forth between the U.S. and Soviet Union where they went after each other with everything from espionage to geopolitics, but didn’t directly pull the trigger. That is much the same of what we see now online. States using all sorts of cyber means to go after their foes, whether it be to steal secrets or plant disinformation, as part of a larger political conflict. And, just as much of our Internet activity – and social, business, and political lives – has moved over to social media, so has that conflict. Which countries are best prepared for a possible cyberwar? Being prepared is a mix of both offence and defence, and this mix is often misunderstood or out of balance. The U.S., for example, has by far the best cyber offence, but it has also been proven to be vulnerable on the defence side to some pretty low level attacks. What you are really after, though, on the defence is “resilience.” Whether it is a nation or a company, you’ll never be able to deter or stop every attack on you.
Instead, what matters most is your ability to either shrug them off, or rapidly recover. So while nations like the U.S. and its “Five Eyes” partners, China, Russia, Israel, etc. all have great capability, I’d put a smaller nation like Estonia in the better prepared category. It’s a vibrant, digital democracy, but has also designed its strategy around the likelihood of being attacked (from past experience with Russia). What do you think about Russia’s plans to disconnect from the Internet? Good luck with that. If you are truly disconnected, it would throw you back to 1980s style operations and economy. But the reality is what Russia is after is not about a defence from cyberattack per say, but rather an attempt at mass censorship, trying to control the flow of information and truth itself. It is the model a China has tried with its “great firewall.” What is the role of social media in a cyberwar? If “cyberwar” is about the hacking of networks. It is about how people on the networks can be hacked through a mix of likes, shares, and lies. We’ve seen it everywhere from elections in the U.S., the UK, Brazil, etc. to the rise of ISIS to gang use to Russian information operations. Indeed, the scale and impact is well past what most people realise. In Brexit, 1/3 of the online conversation – which is now so key to people’s beliefs and actions – was generated by inauthentic accounts like bots and trolls posing as someone else. In turn, in the 2016 U.S. election, we now know that over 140 million Americans – half the population – was unwittingly exposed to Russian propaganda through Facebook. And all this type of activities continues into 2019 and beyond for the simple reason that it works.