Inside Cyber Warfare - Jeffrey Carr [5]
Since then, most of the PRC’s focus has been on cyber espionage activities in accordance with its military strategy to focus on mitigating the technological superiority of the US military.
Israel
In late December 2008, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead against Palestine. A corresponding cyber war quickly erupted between Israeli and Arabic hackers, which has been the norm of late when two nation-states are at war.
The unique aspect of this case is that at least part of the cyber war was engaged in by state hackers rather than the more common nonstate hackers. Members of the Israeli Defense Forces hacked into the Hamas TV station Al-Aqsa to broadcast an animated cartoon showing the deaths of Hamas leaders with the tag line “Time is running out” (in Arabic).
In contrast, during the Chechnya, Estonia, and Georgia conflicts, nationalistic nonstate hackers acted in concert but were not in the employ of any nation-state.
That is the second complication: attribution. And lack of attribution is one of the benefits for states who rely on or otherwise engage nonstate hackers to conduct their cyber campaigns. In other words, states gain plausible deniability.
Russia
The Second Russian-Chechen War (1997–2001)
During this conflict, in which the Russian military invaded the breakaway region of Chechnya to reinstall a Moscow-friendly regime, both sides used cyberspace to engage in Information Operations to control and shape public perception.
Even after the war officially ended, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) was reportedly responsible for knocking out two key Chechen websites at the same time that Russian Spetsnaz troops engaged Chechen terrorists who were holding Russian civilians hostage in a Moscow theater on October 26, 2002.
The Estonian cyber attacks (2007)
Although there is no hard evidence linking the Russian government to the cyber attacks launched against Estonian government websites during the week of April 27, 2007, at least one prominent Russian Nashi youth leader, Konstantin Goloskokov, has admitted his involvement along with some associates. Goloskokov turned out to be the assistant to State Duma Deputy Sergei Markov of the pro-Kremlin Unified Russia party.
The activating incident was Estonia’s relocation of the statue “The Bronze Soldier of Tallinn,” dedicated to soldiers of the former Soviet Union who had died in battle. The resulting massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks took down Estonian websites belonging to banks, parliament, ministries, and communication outlets.
The Russia-Georgia War (2008)
This is the first example of a cyber-based attack that coincided directly with a land, sea, and air invasion by one state against another. Russia invaded Georgia in response to Georgia’s attack against separatists in South Ossetia. The highly coordinated cyber campaign utilized vetted target lists of Georgian government websites as well as other strategically valuable sites, including the US and British embassies. Each site was vetted in terms of whether it could be attacked from Russian or Lithuanian IP addresses. Attack vectors included DDoS, SQL injection, and cross-site scripting (XSS).
Iran
The Iranian presidential elections of 2009 spawned a massive public protest against election fraud that was fueled in large part by the availability of social media such as Twitter and Facebook as outlets for public protest. The Iranian government responded by instituting a harsh police action against protesters and shutting down media channels as well as Internet access inside the country. Some members of the opposition movement resorted to launching DDoS attacks against Iranian government websites. Twitter was used to recruit additional cyber warriors to their cause, and links to automated DDoS software made it easy for anyone to participate.
North Korea
Over the July 4th weekend of 2009, a few dozen US websites, including US government sites