In the wars of the future,
hackers will be the front-line troops
writes Maria Nguyen in the Icon Section of the Sydney Morning Herald of
Saturday, August 18, 2001
The next time you get an error message when trying to access your email, log into your
bank account or buy groceries online, it could be more than the server being down. The
country could be under attack.
The wars of the future will be fought on a new battleground - the Internet - according
to defence experts. Soldiers of the future - hackers and "hactivists" - will
carry notebooks, modems and cracking tools to exploit our reliance on digital systems,
which already control everything from traffic lights and company inventory systems through
to power grids and news services.
The Internet, which links the world's networks, will make it possible for attacks to be
carried out from the other side of the globe, with the only clear risk to the attacker
being counter cyber attacks.
The Code Red worm has demonstrated how vulnerable we are, but consequences such as the
message "Hacked by Chinese", which appeared on infected computers, are the least
of our worries.
Sabotage of a city's power structure, misinformation on sites or email, company
intranets being breached with Trojan horses, funds being stolen from financial
institutions, worm viruses deleting dates, Web sites being blasted with digital bombs
using denial-of-service (DoS) programs ... a wide range of attacks is possible and is
happening.
The potential damage is far-reaching, according to information-warfare experts such as
James Adams, founder and former CEO of iDefense, a US intelligence consulting firm.
"As territory, money, power and economy - all the seeds of war - migrate to the
virtual space, so will war itself," he says. "[Cyber war] is the virtual
equivalent of nuclear deployment."
The world is becoming increasingly reliant on computer networks and the Internet to
deliver critical services. They are used to manage power supplies and emergency services
such as hospitals and the police. They support our financial and telecommunications
systems, as well as our transportation and defence services.
Networks are the wheels that keep our economy and society running. But they also have
the potential to destroy our security and way of life.
We're facing a doubled-edged sword, Adams says.
"It is one of the paradoxes of the information age that the more connected you
are, the more vulnerable you become. The targets of attack can range from the purely
military - command and control networks - to the civilian - financial markets, power or
water supplies. These are now much easier to attack using cyber tools than they would be
using conventional kinetic force with bombs and missiles."
Given society's crutch-like reliance on computers, the impact of a cyber war could be
just as crippling as any missile attack. In fact, cyber warfare has been described
as "a digital Pearl Harbor". Anyone, any company or any society that relies on
the Internet is at risk, putting connected countries, including Australia, in the front
line.
Science fiction? Unfortunately not. According to the United States General Accounting
Office, in 1999 and 2000, North America suffered 1,300 Net attacks on its defence Web
sites.
"We can already see that cyberspace is increasingly a place of both communication and
war," Adams says. "We know from what other countries such as China, Israel and
France are doing that they see cyber warfare as a key component of future war."
Case in point: when a US spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet on April 1,
there was not only a war of words between the countries' leaders; it led to a wave of
cyber attacks. Up until the main protagonists called a truce on May 9, there were more
than 14,000 co-ordinated hacks of both countries government and corporate systems.
Although groups working independently were probably responsible, evidence
suggests terrorist groups and even government-trained hackers could become involved in
cyber warfare.
US experts have pointed out China and Russia as the two biggest threats in this age of
Net warfare.
Since 1998, hackers using a Russian ISP have embarked on a three-year hacking campaign,
dubbed Moonlight Maze, netting sensitive US secrets and research material to be sold to
the highest bidder. The attacks penetrated security firewalls at NASA, the US Department
of Defence, universities and research institutions. The Americans still have no idea who
is behind it and they can't stop it.
In 1997 the Pentagon embarked on its own Net war exercise, called Eligible Receiver,
where 34 US national security agents posed as Korean hackers and declared war on the US.
With no advance intelligence, and with laptops bought at the local store and hacking tools
freely available online, the "Koreans" broke into 40,000 Department of Defence
systems and shut down power grids and emergency phone services to 12 cities, including
Washington. They also played havoc with logistics, accessing arsenal requests from US
fighter squadrons, sending the squadrons headlights instead of aircraft missiles.
Adams, who is also an adviser to the US Government on Internet defence, concedes
Eligible Receiver was "a striking example of [America's] vulnerability and
impotence".
This was the wake-up call the US Government needed. In 1998 President Bill Clinton set up
the National Infrastructure Protection Centre (NIPC) as an Internet crime-fighting branch
of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Last year he launched a $US2 billion ($3.9
billion) research, education and training plan, effectively to train soldiers in Internet
warfare, both in attack and defence.
However, in this Internet arms race, the Chinese are not far behind. In 1999 China
established an Information Warfare Cell to spearhead the country's Internet fighting
capability. According to global defence authority Jane's, China "is thought to be
researching methods to insert computer viruses into foreign military and civilian computer
networks".
Adams believes there are 30 countries, including China, Russia, India, France and
Israel, that have developed offensive Internet warfare programs.
"Consider that if you buy a piece of hardware or software from [these] countries,
there is a real concern that you will be buying doctored equipment that will siphon copies
of all materials that pass across that hardware or software back to the country of
manufacture," Adams warns.
In Australia, figures from the Australian Computer Emergency Response Team (AUSCERT),
indicate that there has been a six-fold increase in computer attacks from 1998 to 2000,
increasing from a total of 1,300 in 1998 to 8,000 last year.
The Australian Department of Defence and other government agencies are working with the
private sector to research and understand the seriousness and scope of Internet warfare.
Australia does not yet have an Internet warfare unit such as the Clinton-initiated NIPC,
although a Defence Department spokesperson said the department "is aware of these
developments and accords a high priority to the issue".
"Increasing use of the Internet and information technology reliance will
accentuate [cyber warfare's] role in modern warfare," the spokesperson said. "In
the fast-moving world of information technology it is difficult to predict exactly what
types of cyber attacks might dominate."
Earlier this year the Government allocated $2 million to create the E-Security
Co-ordination Group to protect Australia's infrastructure from attack online. It also
formed a sub-committee called the Critical Infrastructure Priorities Group to monitor
ongoing threats and vulnerabilities.
Alan Dupont, from the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National
University, believes that while Internet attacks will play a part in modern warfare, this
form of attack is nothing new.
"I look at this as an age-old part of the art of war in a sense that for thousands
of years, opponents have been trying to disrupt the other's capacity to send messages,
store data and communicate," Dupont says. "And in a sense this is no different.
"What you're trying to deny the other person is accurate, timely information. The
technology and the way in which you do it is very different but the actual aim of it is no
different to what warfare has always been about, which is to degrade the other person's
capacity to conduct war and ultimately to defeat them."
For poorer, weaker countries that are unable to raise modern armies to attack stronger
opponents, cyber warfare is the perfect alternative to compensate for a lack of military
might.
"There's a situation of asymmetric threat," Dupont says. "For example, the
US has overwhelming military power in conventional warfare technologies and no country in
its right mind is going to confront the US on conventional warfare means.
So what does an adversary do? It looks at what's called asymmetric warfare, [where] you
target that country's weaknesses and vulnerabilities and you don't need lots of money and
hardware to do wthat. So, in a sense you can consider this a weapon of the poor and the
weak."
Online warfare means terrorist groups can take their guerilla activities online to inflict
more damage. The Middle East conflict has already spread to the Internet, with the
Palestinians and Israelis engaging in hack attacks and online propaganda.
In fact, the information highway could also be described as a misinformation highway.
Propaganda is as easy to distribute as sending an email to a list of journalists from
onlooking countries. Misinformation tactics - such as broadcasting false information
online to enemy servers, using computer morphing to create a false image of the enemy's
leader calling for a ceasefire - breeds an environment where you no longer know who and
what to trust. Psychologically, this can damage a nation at war, Dupont says.
"The ability to create reality through propaganda is really what this is all about
- to change or get into the minds of the enemy," Dupont says. "That's the
important part of information warfare, not just taking out bits of infrastructure, but
actually psychologically affecting a shift in the battlefield. Information warfare is a
tool and one means of doing that.
"If the Americans were looking to attack Saddam Hussein, they'd be less inclined now
to fire 'bomb pallets' and look more at how they can degrade his armed forces and his
command control, and also actually put in his mind uncertainty and fear about what the
Americans might do next. That's where the propaganda side comes in.
"I think the Bosnian conflict is a good example, because the Serbs were quite
effective in saying their side of the picture by a variety of information warfare
techniques."
At the height of the war, in 1999, the Serbs bombarded media outlets with emails
containing graphic pictures of the effects of NATO bombings, including injured and dead
Serbian civilians.
"And afterwards," says Dupont, "I think a lot of the NATO commanders
believed they were done over by the Serbs."
Protect yourself
While you may not be able to stop all cyber attacks, you can protect yourself from many
of the current viruses that are carried in email attachments by using and regularly
updating anti-virus software and being cautious about opening attachments. Common
anti-virus solutions include Symantec's Norton Antivirus 2001 and Trend's PC-Cillin 2000.
Installing a firewall such as ZoneAlarm (www.zonealarm.com) is recommended to stop hackers
for always-on connections, including cable Net access.
Common Internet weapons
Virus
Program that infects your computer and its files, corrupting or deleting them. It
usually disguises itself inside Word documents or other email attachments. Once in your
system, it makes copies of itself and spreads, like a virus. Example: the I Love You virus
is said to have affected tens of millions of computers, costing an estimated $25 billion.
In the wars of the future, hackers will be the front-line troops, writes Maria Nguyen.
A malicious virus that replicates and carries itself across computer networks. A worm
lives in the computer's memory, consuming its resources and potentially deleting data, so
eventually the computer could shut down. Example: the Code Red worm scanned and infected
servers across the Internet that were using Microsoft IlS server software, and computer
networks using Windows NT or Windows 2000. The Code Red worm has mutated and is still on
the loose, with hundreds of thousands of systems already infected.
Denial-of-Service Attack (DoS)
To access a Web site, your computer sends a message to the server hosting the site
asking it to authenticate itself. In a DoS attack, the user sends so many authentication
requests to the server that the server eventually shuts down because it can't keep up with
the demand. Example: during the US-China hacking war that erupted after the mid-air
collision in April, a Chinese hacker group claimed responsibility for the DoS attack that
shut down the White House site for three hours.
iDefense
www.idefense.com
National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC)
www.nipc.gov
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
www.fbi.gov
Jane's
www.janes.com
AusCERT
www.auscert.com.au
Australian Department of Defence
www.defence.gov.au
Strategic and Defence Studies Centre
sdsc.anu.edu.au
