Cyber War: Our Response to Chamberlain

На пути к кибермиру. Кибероружие как шанс для России

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Cyber War: Our Response to Chamberlain

My own reflections on the issue of cyber warfare weapons as Russia's chance to win long-range high-precision arms race

Cyber warfare is actions by a nation-state to penetrate another nation's computers or networks for the purposes of causing damage or disruption including the activity of using the internet to attack a country’s computers in order to damage communication and transport systems or water and electricity supplies. Cyber war refers to hostile attempts by one nation to penetrate another’s computers or networks.

Cyber warfare is also referred to politically motivated hacking to conduct sabotage and espionage. It is regarded as a form of information warfare sometimes seen as analogous to conventional warfare. Cyber attacks are defined as the top security threat to the United States.

The Pentagon is said to have developed a list of cyber-weapons and cyber-tools, including viruses that can sabotage an adversary’s critical networks, to streamline how the United States engages in computer warfare.

There is a CIA- and a number of other agencies-approved classified list of capabilities that has been in use for several years. The list forms part of what is called the Pentagon’s set of approved “fires” that can be employed against an enemy.

Whether it is a tank, a warplane or a computer virus, it follows the same kind of rules regulating its employment. According to the Pentagon, the integration of cyber-technologies into a formal structure of approved capabilities is perhaps the most significant operational development in military cyber-doctrine in years.

Examples of cyber warfare range widely from cyber attacks on enemy government computers before armed forces ground attack on that nation to cyber assaults on enemy nuclear weapons plants to cyber actions to launch botnets to disrupt enemy government computer systems. Cyber warfare also includes use of programs to crash Web sites and computers to cover other, more aggressive actions in the real world.

It is a common knowledge that, given its computer programming capacity, Russia has every advantage in developing its own cyber war capabilities. However, what exactly is cyber war and what issues need be taken into consideration in our country? Here are some thoughts on certain aspects of developing cyber warfare capabilities in Russia.

We have been hearing sounds of the alarms about "cyber warfare" for at least about the last 20 years. Often, our grasp of the technical aspects of cyber warfare is limited. To date, in all the instances where cyber attack has been used by state actors it was done in order to enhance a conventional attack. In part, that is the reason why so far there has not been significant action in the area of defending against concerted cyber attacks.

Cyber war is first about protecting communication systems. The use of the Internet, computers, and networks gives unique technical characteristics to this kind of hostile actions against foreign enemies and entails international legal aspects of this kind of war. The latter involves current mismatch between technical capabilities to conduct cyber war operations and the governing laws and policies.

Presently, cyber warfare boils down almost exclusively to solving technical issues of data security of communication systems. Leaving technical aspects of controls at major information network boundaries aside, let us focus on the legal aspect of this kind of warfare.

Increasing integration of cyber-technologies into formal structures of approved military capabilities of the world’s leading nations will inevitably end up leading to signing international cyber war treaties, which, like nuclear arms control treaties before, will be used to create "rules of the game" for international war. Therefore, if Russia is to remain on par with the other cyber combatants, it is important to solve most critical technical issues long before the question of international regulations is brought forward. Otherwise, cyber war regulation initiatives on the part of the leading nations might be used to hamper Russia’s progress with this regard. The brightest example is the nuclear nonproliferation treaties, which have been aimed against non-nuclear state- and non-state actors by the nuclear-weapon states.

Thus, any significant actions in the area of cyber war is not only a technical but also a policy issue. Everything, from the history and the players to the regulations to the endless possibilities, needs to be taken into account with this regard. In the meantime, cyber warfare cannot be conducted on a sustained basis. Any cyber attack can and will be eventually discovered and respective data security breach removed. Data security breach is not as simple as just pushing a button – in fact, the average security breach is said to be the result of a very limited number of separate mistakes. Mistakes are made all the time. Therefore, data security breaches occur all the time, somewhere. Cyber war is not about finding ways to cause breaches in every possible target system.