DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [81]
‘As soon as the attack happened, however,’ noted Peeter Lorents, an eminent Estonian mathematician and one of the Centre’s co-founders, ‘the atmosphere changed and we started getting real support from both Brussels and Washington. Indeed, my first reaction on hearing about the attack was to call France and order two cases of Cristal Champagne to be delivered to Mr Putin. By launching this attack, the Russians had surely secured the future of our centre.’
Alarm bells were certainly ringing in Washington. A number of events immediately preceded or followed on from the Estonian incident, and together these convinced the incoming Obama administration in 2009 that cyber defence needed to be strengthened at all costs. In particular, a few months after Estonia, it dawned on America’s huge global surveillance operation, the National Security Agency (NSA), just how serious the loss in April 2001 of an EP-3E Aries reconnaissance plane to the Chinese Air Force really was. Although the pilot had succeeded in destroying the software before it went down, the hardware was intact and, as soon as it fell into Chinese hands, they began to reverse-engineer the state-of-the-art technology that would enable them to monitor and decode encrypted communications. Soon after Obama’s election to the White House the Chinese started testing their new toy, and their new capability at intercepting communications was observed by the NSA. The Chinese, it seems, wanted to indicate to Washington that it had successfully cracked the technology.
The United States government did not stop at putting its weight behind the cyber-defence centre in Tallinn, which, since 2008, has been conducting major research, including complex cyber military exercises. Computing networks had become so critical a part, both of the Defense Department’s infrastructure and of its offensive and defensive operational capability, that Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense, made the momentous decision to create a new military domain – cyberspace.
This fifth military domain – a sibling to land, sea, air and space – is the first-ever man-made sphere of military operations, and the rules surrounding combat in it are almost entirely opaque. Along with the domain, the Pentagon has set up USCYBERCOMMAND to monitor hostile activity in cyberspace and, if necessary, plan to deploy offensive weapons like Stuxnet. For the moment, the US is the acknowledged leader in the cyber offensive capability.
‘Cyber offensive capability’ should not be mistaken for an ability to deploy conventional weapons that are enhanced by computer systems. The best examples from this latter arsenal are the drones (which the US has regularly deployed in Afghanistan and Pakistan) that can undertake surveillance and fighting missions while being piloted by a computer operator in Nevada.
Cyber weapons are the hacking tools that enable a cyber soldier to penetrate the computer systems of an enemy’s CNI (Critical National Infrastructure), such as their energy and water grids. Once in control of the system, the military doctrine goes, the cyber commander can order their shutdown (or, as we know from Stuxnet, trigger a very damaging explosion) so that within a matter of days the affected society will be reduced to Stone Age technology.
That, at least, is the idea. For the moment, the United States is the acknowledged front-runner as developer of offensive cyber weapons. But the Chinese, the French and the Israelis are snapping at their heels, with the Indians and British not far behind.
The militarisation of cyberspace was foreseeable. Where this is leading us is, by contrast, understood by nobody. Writing in The New Yorker, the ever-perceptive Seymour Hersh teased out the implications of the Chinese having nicked the secrets from the reconnaissance plane’s