The winds of cyber war

At the same time Georgia's physical defenses were under assault from Russian troops, its technological infrastructure was under assault from denial of service attacks, forcing many government Web sites offline. Cyber attacks will likely become an increasingly common element of future warfare, and governments are taking steps to shore up IT defenses.

The computer attacks Russia allegedly orchestrated against Georgia in August have raised the cyber warfare bar to a new threat level. The cyber assault that accompanied Russia's armed maneuver into its former territory of Georgia escalated to an international event.

The concept of hurting a nation's technological infrastructure  as part of a wider conflict is not new. The extent to which the digital warfare was waged, however, clearly added to a growing concern that has already led U.S. officials to prepare for the next wave of computer warfare.

We now have entered a new age of cyber warfare, one in which attacks are apparently waged by governments for military purposes rather than -- or, perhaps, in addition to -- high-tech gangs of criminals seeking financial gain. Governments and Internet security  firms are quietly gearing up for the potential onslaught. The U.S. government has created a secret computer warfare response team to meet this new international threat.

"We know that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security  (DHS) is behind a big initiative on cyber warfare. We've seen more government reactions each time an incident is discovered. Generally, it takes six to nine months after a new incident to accelerate defensive efforts. We are slowly getting up momentum. We know that the U.S. government is involved in cyber attacks, but this is being hushed up," Mandeep Khera, researcher for Web application security security testing firm Cenzic, told TechNewsWorld.

Cyber War Primer

DHS statistics in published accounts showed that 37,000 attempted breaches of government and private computer systems were reported in fiscal 2007. Those incidents increased from the 24,000 reported the previous year.

In addition, FBI reports from last year show that 108 countries have dedicated cyber attack capabilities. Groups within China's government and computer networks based inside Russia have been linked to cyber attacks aimed at various government agencies in the U.S. and Europe.

For instance, for three weeks starting in April of 2007, 1 million computers under botnet control started attacking the Estonian government's computers in a denial of service (DoS) assault. Following that series of digital attacks, NATO provided the Estonian government with help in restoring its computer systems and investigating the attacks. Considerable evidence reportedly pointed to computers in Russia as the source of the commands; however, Russia's government has denied any involvement.

Computer security experts have theorized that cyber attacks like the ones hackers were using for spam and ID theft operations could easily become weapons for political and military purposes against governments.

 

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