Inside Cyber Warfare - Jeffrey Carr [100]
Ironically, Russia waged its own style of information warfare on those very nations, including Chechnya (in 2002), Kyrgyzstan (in 2005 and 2009), Estonia (in 2007), Lithuania (in 2008), and Georgia (in 2008) in the form of network and government website attacks by nonstate hackers.
Creating a legend for a cyber attack
There are a few key sections that directly apply to the Kremlin keeping its distance from the activities of its nationalistic hackers during each of the aforementioned examples:
In our view, isolating cyber terrorism and cyber crime from the general context of international information security is, in a sense, artificial and unsupported by any real objective necessity. This is because the effect of a “cybernetic” weapon does not depend on the motivation of a source of destructive impact, whereas it is primarily motivation that distinguishes acts of cyber terrorism, cyber crime, and military cyber attacks. The rest of their attributes may be absolutely similar. The practical part of the problem is that the target of a cyber attack, while in the process of repelling it, will not be informed about the motives guiding its source, and, accordingly, will be unable to qualify what is going on as a criminal, terrorist or military-political act. The more so that sources of cyber attacks can be easily given a legend as criminal or terrorist actions.
After establishing the tactical importance of maintaining a “legend” or cover for an act of cyber warfare to be indistinguishable from an act of cyber crime or cyber terror, the authors go on to decry efforts of the United States to secure international legislation that might infringe on a state’s internal affairs in these matters:
International legal acts regulating relations arising in the process of combating cyber crime and cyber terrorism must not contain norms violating such immutable principles of international law as noninterference in the internal affairs of other states, and the sovereignty of the latter.
Moreover, politically motivated cyber attacks executed on orders from governmental structures can be qualified as military crimes with all the ensuing procedures of investigation and criminal persecution of the culprits. Besides, military cyber attacks can be considered as a subject of international public law. In this case, we should speak about imposing restrictions on development and use of computers intended to bring hostile influences to bear on objects in other states’ cyberspace.
In any event, the military policy in the area of international information security where it involves opposition to cyber terrorism and cyber crime should be directed at introducing international legal mechanisms that would make it possible to contain potential aggressors from uncontrolled and surreptitious use of cyber weapons against the Russian Federation and its geopolitical allies.
They attempt to make a case for international regulations that would limit the ability of Western nations to support opposition parties in the breakaway republics now known as the CIS:
A case in point illustrating a foreign interference in the affairs of a sovereign state was the use of numerous English and Russian websites in support of the opposition forces in Kyrgyzstan during protests in November 2006. Published in the Internet, the opposition leaders’ appeals for mass-scale anti-presidential rallies led to a surge of popular unrest in the republic.
It’s interesting that they mention Kyrgyzstan and the opposition’s use of the Web to express dissent. Yet these authors attempt to make the debate about free speech rather than addressing the act of cyber warfare that was used by nonstate Russian hackers to silence the opposition’s Internet presence one year earlier during the Tulip Revolution (from a special report by the Open Net Initiative, February 28, 2005):
On February 26th an apparent Distributed Denial Of Service Attack (DDOS) temporarily disabled all websites hosted by major Kyrgyz ISPs (Elcat and AsiaInfo). These ISPs host the websites of many Kyrgyz political parties, media