In August, Russian troops moved into Georgia. Observers dispute who fired first, but there was a little noticed dimension of the conflict that will have major repercussions for the future.
Computer hackers attacked Georgian government Web sites in the weeks preceding the outbreak of armed conflict. The Russia-Georgia conflict represents the first significant cyber attacks accompanying armed conflict. Welcome to the 21st century.
Cyber threats and potential cyber warfare illustrate the increased vulnerabilities and loss of control in modern societies. Governments have mainly been concerned about hacker attacks on their own bureaucracy’s information technology infrastructure, but there are social vulnerabilities well beyond government computers.
In an open letter to the US president in September last year, US professionals in cyber defense warned that “the critical infrastructure of the United States, including electrical power, finance, telecommunications, health care, transportation, water, defense, and the Internet, is highly vulnerable to cyber attack. Fast and resolute mitigating action is needed to avoid national disaster.”
In the murky world of the Internet, attackers are difficult to identify.
In today’s interconnected world, an unidentified cyber attack on non-governmental infrastructure might be severely damaging. For example, some experts believe that a nation’s electric power grid may be particularly susceptible. The control systems that electric power companies use are thought vulnerable to attack, which could shut down cities and regions for days or weeks. Cyber attacks may also interfere with financial markets and cause immense economic loss by closing down commercial Web sites.
Some scenarios, including an “electronic Pearl Harbor,” sound alarmist, but they illustrate the diffusion of power from central governments to individuals. In 1941, the powerful Japanese navy used many resources to create damage thousands of miles away. Today, an individual hacker using malicious software can cause chaos in far-away places at little cost to himself.
Moreover, the information revolution enables individuals to perpetrate sabotage with unprecedented speed and scope. The so-called “love bug virus,” launched in the Phillipines in 2000, is estimated to have cost billions of dollars in damage. Terrorists, too, can exploit new vulnerabilities in cyberspace to engage in asymmetrical warfare.
In 1998, when the US complained about seven Moscow Internet addresses involved in the theft of Pentagon and NASA secrets, the Russian government replied that phone numbers from which the attacks originated were inoperative. The US had no way of knowing whether the Russian government had been involved.
More recently, last year, China’s government was accused of sponsoring thousands of hacking incidents against German federal government computers and defense and private-sector computer systems in the US. But it was difficult to prove the source of the attack, and the Pentagon had to shut down some of its computer systems.
When Estonia’s government moved a World War II statue commemorating Soviet war dead last year, hackers retaliated with a costly denial-of-service attack that closed down Estonia’s access to the Internet. There was no way to prove whether the Russian government, a spontaneous nationalist response, or both aided this transnational attack.
In January, US President George W. Bush signed two presidential directives that called for establishing a comprehensive cyber-security plan, and his budget for next year requested US$6 billion to develop a system to protect national cyber security.
President-elect Barack Obama is likely to follow suit. In his campaign, Obama called for tough new standards for cyber security and physical resilience of critical infrastructure, and promised to appoint a national cyber adviser who will report directly to him and be responsible for developing policy and coordinating federal agency efforts.
That job will not be easy, because much of the relevant infrastructure is not under direct government control. Just recently, US Deputy Director of National Intelligence Donald Kerr warned that “major losses of information and value for our government programs typically aren’t from spies ... In fact, one of the great concerns I have is that so much of the new capabilities that we’re all going to depend on aren’t any longer developed in government labs under government contract.”
Kerr described what he called “supply chain attacks” in which hackers not only steal proprietary information, but go further and insert erroneous data and programs in communications hardware and software — Trojan horses that can be used to bring down systems. All governments will find themselves exposed to a new type of threat that will be difficult to counter.
Governments can hope to deter cyber attacks just as they deter nuclear or other armed attacks. But deterrence requires a credible threat of response against an attacker. And that becomes much more difficult in a world where governments find it hard to tell where cyber attacks come from, whether from a hostile state or a group of criminals masking as a foreign government.
While an international legal code that defines cyber attacks more clearly, together with cooperation on preventive measures, can help, such arms-control solutions are not likely to be sufficient. Nor will defensive measures like constructing electronic firewalls and creating redundancies in sensitive systems.
Given the enormous uncertainties involved, the new cyber dimensions of security must be high on every government’s agenda.
Joseph Nye is a professor at Harvard University and an author.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017