Inside Cyber Warfare - Jeffrey Carr [4]
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Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank Tim O’Reilly, Mike Loukides, Mac Slocum, and all of the great people at O’Reilly Media for supporting my work and making the difficult process of writing a book as stress-free as possible. I’d also like to thank my research assistants, Tim, Jennifer, and Catherine, for the hard work they put into researching the content for Chapters 16 and 17, which, while not complete, is the most comprehensive body of work on this topic that I believe exists anywhere in the public domain today.
Chapter 1. Assessing the Problem
You can’t say that civilization don’t advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way.
—Will Rogers, New York Times, December 23, 1929
Whenever someone asks if anyone ever died in a cyber war, Magomed Yevloev springs to mind.
On August 31, 2008, in the North Caucasus Republic of Ingushetia, Yevloev was arrested by Nazran police, ostensibly for questioning regarding his anti-Kremlin website Ingushetia.ru. As he was being transported to police headquarters, one of the officers in the car “accidentally” discharged his weapon into the head of Magomed Yevloev.
The US Department of State called for an investigation. Vladimir Putin reportedly said that there would be an investigation. To date, nothing has been done.
Ingushetia.ru (now Ingushetia.org) and the Chechen website kavkazcenter.com are some of the earliest examples of politically motivated Russian cyber attacks dating as far back as 2002. In other words, in addition to Russian military operations in Chechnya, there were cyber attacks launched against opposition websites as well.
The Russia-Georgia War of August 2008 is the latest example, occurring just a few weeks before Magomed Yevloev’s killing. If anyone would qualify as a casualty of cyber warfare, it might just be this man.
The Complex Domain of Cyberspace
The focus of this book is cyber warfare, and therein lies the first complexity that must be addressed. As of this writing, there is no international agreement on what constitutes an act of cyber war, yet according to McAfee’s 2008 Virtual Criminology Report, there are over 120 nations “leveraging the Internet for political, military, and economic espionage activities.”
The US Department of Defense (DOD) has prepared a formal definition of this new warfighting domain, which is discussed in Chapter 11, but inspired by the writings of Sun Tzu, I offer this definition instead:
Cyber Warfare is the art and science of fighting without fighting; of defeating an opponent without spilling their blood.
To that end, what follows are some examples of the disparate ways in which governments have attempted to force their wills against their adversaries and find victory without bloodshed in the cyber domain.
Cyber Warfare in the 20th and 21st Centuries
China
The emergence of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) hacker community was instigated by a sense of national outrage at anti-Chinese riots taking place in Indonesia in May 1998. An estimated 3,000 hackers self-organized into a group called the China Hacker Emergency Meeting Center, according to Dahong Min’s 2005 blog entry entitled “Say goodbye to Chinese hackers’ passionate era: Writing on the dissolving moment of ‘Honker Union of China.’” The hackers launched attacks against Indonesian government websites in protest.
About one year later, on May 7, 1999, a NATO jet accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Less than 12 hours later, the Chinese Red Hacker Alliance was formed and began a series of attacks against several hundred US government websites.
The next event occurred in 2001 when a Chinese fighter jet collided with a US military aircraft over the South China Sea. This time over 80,000 hackers became engaged in launching a “self-defense” cyber