Pentagon: The global cyberwar is just beginning
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| Washington
The Pentagon is rapidly preparing for cyberwar in the face of alarming and growing threats, say senior defense officials, who add that sophisticated attacks have prompted them to take the striking step of investigating the feasibility of expanding NATO鈥檚 collective defense tenet to include cyberspace.
But as such planning intensifies, the military is struggling with some basics of warfare 鈥 including how to define exactly what, for starters, constitutes an attack, and what level of cyberattack warrants a cyber-reprisal.
鈥淚 mean, clearly if you take down significant portions of our economy we would probably consider that an attack,鈥 William Lynn, the deputy secretary of defense, said recently. 鈥淏ut an intrusion stealing data, on the other hand, probably isn鈥檛 an attack. And there are [an] enormous number of steps in between those two.鈥
Today, one of the challenges facing Pentagon strategists is 鈥渄eciding at what threshold do you consider something an attack,鈥 Mr. Lynn said. 鈥淚 think the policy community both inside and outside the government is wrestling with that, and I don鈥檛 think we鈥檝e wrestled it to the ground yet.鈥
Equally tricky, defense officials say, is how to pinpoint who is doing the attacking. And this raises further complications that go to the heart of the Pentagon鈥檚 mission. 鈥淚f you don鈥檛 know who to attribute an attack to, you can鈥檛 retaliate against that attack,鈥 noted Lynn in a recent discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations.
As a result, 鈥淵ou can鈥檛 deter through punishment, you can鈥檛 deter by retaliating against the attack.鈥 He lamented the complexities that make cyberwar so different from, say, 鈥渘uclear missiles, which of course come with a return address.鈥
How to pinpoint the source of a cyberattack is a subject being discussed by Pentagon officials with their counterparts in Britain, Canada, and Australia, among others, in advance of the upcoming NATO summit in Lisbon in November, at which cyberwarfare is an item on the agenda. Officials from NATO member states are also discussing such fundamental issues as how to share information and exchange related technologies, illustrating that the concept of a collective cyberwarfare defense is still in its infancy.
Lynn is among those working to develop the Pentagon's new cyberstrategy, which is focusing both on how to defend the military's classified networks as well as how to protect the Internet itself.
This upending of some key tenets of military doctrine is prompting the Pentagon to look to some surprising new places for strategic models of cyberdefense, including public health. 鈥淎 public health model has some interesting applications," Lynn said. "Can we use the kinds of techniques we use to prevent diseases? Could those be applied to the Internet?鈥
To that end, the Pentagon is now researching means of introducing internal defenses to the Internet so that it acts more like a human organism. When it鈥檚 hit with a virus, for example, it might mutate to fend it off. Such strategies are meant to 鈥渟hift the advantage much more to the defender and away from the attacker,鈥 Lynn said.
The problem is that the Internet currently has very few natural defenses. And sophisticated crafted viruses like Stuxnet are even tougher to fend off. Indeed, the Web 鈥渨as not developed with security in mind,鈥 he added. 鈥淚t was developed with transparency in mind; it was developed with ease of technological innovation.鈥 Those same attributes do not lend themselves to good security. Among the potential targets for cyberattack frequently mentioned by cybersecurity experts are the nation's powergrid and financial system.
It was in 2008 that a cyberattack on Pentagon networks 鈥 an attack attributed to an unnamed "foreign intelligence service" 鈥 served as a wake-up call for US defense leadership. 鈥淭o that point, we did not think our classified networks could be penetrated, so it was 鈥 it was a fairly shocking development,鈥 said Lynn, adding that it was a 鈥渟eminal moment鈥 in a new military frontier.
Lynn put forward an analogy to early American warfare that the Pentagon often likes to call upon to illustrate its point. 鈥淚f you figure the Internet is 20, 20-plus years old, and you kind of analogize to aviation 鈥 the first military aircraft was bought, I think, in 1908, somewhere around there. So we鈥檙e in about 1928,鈥 he said.
鈥淲e鈥檝e kind of seen some 鈥 biplanes shoot at each other over France,鈥 he added. 鈥淏ut we haven鈥檛 really seen kind of what a true cyberconflict is going to look like.鈥
He warned, however, that there were a few things that appear clear. It is a kind of war that 鈥渋s going to be 鈥 more sophisticated, it鈥檚 going to be more damaging, it鈥檚 going to be more threatening鈥 than it appears at the present, Lynn said. 鈥淎nd it鈥檚 one of the reasons we鈥檙e trying to get our arms around the strategy in front of this rather than respond to the event.鈥