Opinion

Coleman: The Cyber Arms Race Has Begun

Kevin Coleman of Technolytics Institute says the Estonia-Russia conflict was just the tip of the iceberg in cyber warfare.

By Kevin Coleman, Technolytics Institute

January 28, 2008 — CSO —

If you did not catch it, the world witnessed the first cyber war in April and May of 2007. The battle took place between Estonia and Russia. At the peak of the battle over 4 million bogus transactions per second were launched and struck their desired targets. Countries all over the world have been developing and implementing cyber warfare strategies designed to defend their infrastructure and impact their enemy’s command and control structure, logistics, transportation, early warning defenses and other critical, military functions.

A cyber war is defined as a conflict that uses hostile, illegal transactions or attacks on computers and networks in an effort to disrupt communications and other pieces of infrastructure as a mechanism to inflict economic harm or upset defenses.

Technology experts and military strategists as well as city and urban planners are collaborating on cyber warfare strategies design to disrupt and defend against critical offensive and defensive operations. The Naval Postgraduate School has defined three levels of offensive cyber capabilities.

1. Simple-Unstructured: the capability to conduct basic hacks against individual systems using tools created by someone else.

2. Advanced-Structured: the capability to conduct more sophisticated attacks against multiple systems and possibly to modify or create basic tools.

3. Complex-Coordinated: the capability for coordinated attacks capable of causing mass-disruption against many defense systems.

Using a combination of the above levels of capabilities cyber war plans are emerging and driving the need for a wide range of cyber weapons. Cyber attacks occur on a much too frequent basis. Many people are unaware that based on the latest statistics, over 6,500 serious computer attacks have been reported in the last minute. In July of 2007 there were nearly three times the number of cyber breaches than in any other single month and nearly 1/3 of all intrusions for the year. Spy-Ops stated that security professionals continue to see a surge in system intrusion attempts, phishing, hacking, and worm and virus outbreaks. Many security experts believe this was the work of a coordinated group of hackers. However, it is not known if the effort had any ties to certain foreign governments. For the second time in seven years, the Internet became the world’s newest battleground as online cyber skirmishes broke out between the US and China. This latest cyber skirmish took place in the summer months of 2007 and threatened to intensify into a full-blown cyber war. Some U.S. cyber security leaders downplayed the severity of the incident, while international experts expressed concerns over the cyber exchange. These recent events have underscored the vulnerability of the United States information and control systems to cyber attacks. A June 2007 report to the U.S. Congress warned that the People’s Republic of China is brewing cyber network attacks which could cause "disruption and chaos" with the "magnitude of a weapon of mass destruction". The Department of Homeland Security reported attacks against the United States were up nearly 900% between 2005 and 2007. Other sources stated the U.S. Department of Defense experiences nearly 3 million network and systems attacks per day. You can be sure that President Bush will use statistics like these in his push to get a $6 billion line item to develop defenses for the Government’s information infrastructure approved in his upcoming budget.