Richard Clarke: China's Cyberassault On America

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304259304576373391101828876.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

by tptacek • 15 years ago

100 70 15 years ago

online.wsj.com

n1ck4n3• 15 years ago

The Aurora attacks were followed by systematic penetrations of one industry after another. In the so-called Night Dragon series, attackers apparently in China went after major oil and gas companies, not only in the U.S. but throughout the world ---

One more "for" argument: in Asia, China's been accused by Phillippines and Vietnam, as well as Japan of aggressively invading their territorial waters, islands. Those areas are likely rich of oil. Actions such as sending war boats to damage fishing boats are a sign of China's ambition to seek more oil, oil and oil...

Relevant link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110614/ap_on_re_as/as_china_us

nl• 15 years ago

Why make an unsubstantiated link between the hacking incidents and the South China Sea conflicts? The South China Sea has been a source of territorial conflicts though-out history.

In modern times there have been brief shooting conflict between China & Vietnam in 1974, and 1988 [1], and there have been numerous incidents since.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_China_Sea#Territorial_cla...

n1ck4n3• 15 years ago

If you look at Paracel Islands, yeah, maybe China's close to it. But if you look at Spratly islands, which are very much territories of either Vietnam, Indonesia or the Phillipines. And China is to claim it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:South_China_Sea.jpg

Plus, the attacks happened around Spratly islands, 2 days right after Shangri-la Dialogue, with the participation of top military bosses, including Robert Gates, where China promised to use peace talks to resolve the problem.

My 2 cents here:

1. China has always been a world of its own, it acts by its rules and what it promises is just what is says, what it does is another thing.

2. China has become BIG, and worse, it IS aggressive. We'd better be prepared for a coming war, be it cyber or economical or traditional.

We might be under a much bigger threat than what the media could convey, like that picture by David Gothard http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ED-AN742_clarke_D_...

siculars2• 15 years ago

Ya, that sounds about right. The sad truth is that defending our cyber space, or cyber space in general, is a Sisyphean task. No one can do it, least of all the government. There are just too many vectors of attack and too many targets and, frankly, not enough people who know anything about cyber-security. Even people who do know about security are routinely hacked, see Google, RSA, Lockheed, et al.

The only rational way to combat catastrophic cyber warfare is to disuade our enemies from engaging in it. Some say it has worked for us before, MAD[0] (note section on criticism, which obviously plays here). As mentioned in the WSJ[1] a few weeks ago:

"One idea gaining momentum at the Pentagon is the notion of "equivalence." If a cyber attack produces the death, damage, destruction or high-level disruption that a traditional military attack would cause, then it would be a candidate for a "use of force" consideration, which could merit retaliation."

This notion that a cyber attack could result in a real military response must be delivered to the highest levels of decision making throughout the world. We can only hope that the message is received.

Obviously, we must do all we can on defense but no defense will be foolproof. It is just not possible. Stating our intentions in the event of a devastating cyber attack is the only real option we have.

Everything short of national catastrophe should be dealt with in other ways. Industrial espionage is a major consideration but that should be taken to arbitrage at forums like the WTO. I'm all for free trade and everything it has to offer as long as there is an even playing field. At the risk of conflating issues I will simply say that China's ongoing espionage is an extension of unfair trading practices that work to create an uneven playing field between them and everyone else.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction

[1]http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230456310457635...

w1ntermute3• 15 years ago

> The only rational way to combat catastrophic cyber warfare is to disuade our enemies from engaging in it.

Well, there is one other way. The Chinese have a proverb for it - "以毒攻毒". Fight fire with fire.

No doubt the Chinese government is doing the same sort of stuff to other governments as well. It may be possible to gain leverage with them by socioeconomically isolating by exposing their misdeeds. If we're good enough, we could even stir up foment within China.

wisty2• 15 years ago

The English have a proverb - "People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones".

China spends a lot of time and money keeping their internet, um, secure.

Volpe2• 15 years ago

The pentagons posturing on using force in retaliation to cyber attacks, would be a hard sell [to the public] to ever actually perform one of these retaliations... Especially with such a prominent target as China.

Rather than an arms race in cyber-warfare, is it possible to work out why these attacks are occurring? A militarily non-aggressive nation (outside of its own borders) continuously attacking external targets for no reason, feels like we are missing some of the story.

hugh3• 15 years ago

Just to prove they can, perhaps.

siculars2• 15 years ago

I'm pretty sure the US public would require retaliation in the event of, say, a prolonged regional blackout, a breached dam, a meltdown at a nuclear facility or any other number of real world insanity caused by a cyber attack.

"for no reason" I'm sure there are reasons. LulzSec does it for the "lulz". China has their own reasons, whatever they are they are and we can sit and discuss them but there needs to be red lines. Figuring those reasons out does not mean we should not have a well known military posture in certain eventualities.

mquander• 15 years ago

Well, the difference is that when someone fires nuclear ICBMs everyone typically knows unambiguously where the missiles came from and where they went.

To me, drumbeating over hacker threats is just a preparation to give the government yet another carte blanche to do whatever they want. At some point, there will be a grave "cyberattack" which the government detects and there will be lies, lies, lies, and more lies about it, which nobody external will be in a position to contradict, and the government will take it as political justification for retaliating in whatever manner they wish against Iran, China, North Korea, or an as-yet-unnamed enemy of the day.

As a citizen of the USA, the only way I would be comfortable treating a "cyberattack" as an act of war is if there were some kind of transparent, independent, and obviously competent commission evaluating the attack, and I have no faith that such a thing would ever happen in the event of some attack on government information.

nradov3• 15 years ago

No, MAD doesn't help in this case. The other side always has plausible deniability. Did an attack really come from China or was it perpetrated by crackers in a third country routing traffic through pwned Chinese PCs? How can you ever be sure? If the US government makes a false accusation even once and is proven wrong then they lose all credibility going forward.

yaix8• 15 years ago

To find out where an attack originated, it is probably better to ask who it benefits.

chipsy• 15 years ago

Non-state entities like Anonymous, et. al, exist on the same playing field as China, yet there is no military response to be had for them, short of treating the internet itself as a form of "nuclear arms" and putting correspondingly enormous restrictions on it for civilians - something which is not likely to happen anytime soon, given how much the world economy is starting to rely on this infrastructure.

rsingel• 15 years ago

Why is this cyber "warfare" and not just another way of spying - something all countries do without it being an act of war? The only thing we've seen close to "cyberwar" is Stuxnet and that was most likely the U.S. and Israel.

Zakharov2• 15 years ago

From the article: "The targeting of specific U.S. officials is not something that a mere hacker gang could do."

This is patently false. Anyone could target a U.S. official, and many could even succeed. Nevertheless, the other arguments the article presents are sufficient to support its conclusion.

tlb• 15 years ago

I assume he means that a large number of officials were individually targeted, requiring large numbers of hackers working in tandem.

cageface• 15 years ago

Perhaps this kind of thing is going to eventually fundamentally change the way we build software? In most of the common development stacks is an afterthought if it's addressed at all. If even security "experts" are getting hacked something is deeply wrong.

percept• 15 years ago

This is the most important comment here, IMO.

What should we be doing about this, now, individually, collectively?

gamble• 15 years ago

I've always wondered what the US would do if China started flying sigint surveillance planes along the edge of US territorial airspace. Or if Americans discovered that the Chinese had interception equipment in critical telecom switching stations throughout the world that allowed them to divert America's commercial and governmental communications to Chinese supercomputers for decryption.

There are a lot of things that America does to other countries that would be taken as acts of war if they were done to America.

bdhe• 15 years ago

There are a lot of things that America does to other countries that would be taken as acts of war if they were done to America.

Is this the foreshadowing of a second Cold War, albeit with a different super power and in completely new battlefields? The only problem, as mentioned elsewhere in the thread is that unlike conventional warfare, spoofing the origin of these "weapons" is relatively easy.

Does anyone know of whether people have thought of things like Mutually Assured Destruction in the context of e-commerce and the internet?

Roritharr• 15 years ago

When thinking about mutually assured destruction on the internet, somehow Anonymous and LulzSec come to mind...

matthew-wegner• 15 years ago

There are a lot of things that America does to Americans that would be taken as acts of war if they were done to America.

yaix8• 15 years ago

If you really want to compare, than take Taiwan. An island just off the coast that China claims should be under its control and than is currently not. Same situation as Cuba a few decated ago, the US delivers all kinds of arms and military knowledge and China is not happy about it.

gaius2• 15 years ago

Not the same thing at all, since the US never claims Cuba should be part of Florida.

DanielBMarkham• 15 years ago

There are a lot of things that America does to other countries that would be taken as acts of war if they were done to America.

I have to call bullshit on this, sorry.

The Russians did this sort of thing all the time during the cold war: parking nuclear submarines off the East Coast, flying bomber runs along the border, reconnaissance -- the list goes on and on. On both sides. There was never an "act of war" Even the Cuban Missile Crisis (which did not have mutants, by the way) ended peacefully.

Look, I think it's great to point out there are two sides of every story. But this type of statement goes beyond a simple plea for "take a look at the other side, guys" and heads into propaganda territory, i.e. everything is mostly the same. So I had to call you on it. Let's not go there.

Why? Because this is a good topic. It calls into question the intersection of governments, technology, and rule of law. The whole point of the article is destroyed if you just say it's all the same. It's not.

Every bad thing in the world can't be erased by an over-application of equivocation. That kind of thing is for spinners. We head down this road next you'll be telling me that China owns vast hunks of ocean and various islands that everybody else says they don't.

smackay• 15 years ago

Nations unfortunately engage in a lot of belligerant actions that can easily spiral out of control. The long term risk with the USA conducting operations in international waters around China - which they are perfectly entitled to do so - is that areas of contested territory such as the Spratly islands in the South China Sea could easily become flashpoints for needless conflict.

trotsky• 15 years ago

Or if Americans discovered that the Chinese had interception equipment in critical telecom switching stations throughout the world that allowed them to divert America's commercial and governmental communications to Chinese supercomputers for decryption.

Based on the way the American IC reacts, we already believe they do this quite broadly. It's called Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. http://www.huawei.com/en/

tokenadult• 15 years ago

I've always wondered what the US would do if China started flying sigint surveillance planes along the edge of US territorial airspace.

Probably about what the United States did for decades when the Soviet Union fly sigint surveillance planes along the edge of US territorial airspace. That is, just fly its own planes in international airspace, which has been its practice for a long time. "National means of verification" are what make arms control treaties and other confidence-building measures between nations work.

learc832• 15 years ago

A while back my gmail account was hacked by someone with a chinese IP. It made me wonder.

What if they goal of all this is to build a giant database of identities and known passwords. Say the chinese govt has 50 million online identities each associated with an email address, and known passwords for each.

If they do decide to launch a massive cyber attack, it doesn't matter what security we have in place; they could just log in.

They wouldn't need to find backdoors, they could log in as customers to every major bank and start moving things around. It wouldn't matter if the banks caught it, the only way to stop it would be to shut down all transaction--which would cause the panic the attackers are looking for.

They could do this with any public website, and with enough computing power and bandwidth, do it fast enough to really cause a problem.

Just imagine if they had 0.1% of all public logins and passwords.

nkassis• 15 years ago

Same thing happened to me last year. Freaked me out, I know that that password was the same for a few sites (I know I know but I keep a few levels of passwords) So they had to obtain it from one of those. I never received a message from anywhere telling me that my info had been leaked which means some sites I vist I can't trust. I have no way of knowing which.

krakensden• 15 years ago

What useful `cybersecurity' legislation could you possibly pass? The only thing I can think of is "do not connect x, y, and z systems to the internet," but that still leaves plenty of ground.

aresant• 15 years ago

I wonder what America's Cyberassault on China looks like?

yaix8• 15 years ago

Interesting paper, but not a smart approach. Well, a very ...uhm American approach to the problem. Unilateral.

Better would be to think about an internationally accepted (within the UN framework) mechanism to deal with these attacks. Define what is permissible and what is "over the line". Then define required actions and accepted sanctions when an attack occures.

Governments will always blame it on some "hackers". But a mechanism could define how a government MUST procede when a grave attack is carried out from within its territory. Maybe it MUST accept that law enforcement of the target nation has the right to check equipment used in the offending nation.

Overall, such an international mechanism should be set up to make it more difficult to sneakily carry our those attacks and hide behind some "hackers" accusation.

However, I doubt that the US would be willing to submit to such a mechanism. Because I believe they would be sitting more often on the offending site than on the target site. Until now, the US has not even submitted to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and similar important mechanisms to stop and procecute attrocities against humanity committed during war. The US knows very well why they don't submit to such a court, of course. Same would most likely be the case for any international mechanism against government cyber crimes.

yaix8• 15 years ago

Could somebody explain me why this gets downvoted?

dantheman3• 15 years ago

A lot of people don't like the UN. A lot of people don't like the ICJ.

How does the UN or ICJ provide "similar important mechanisms to stop and procecute attrocities against humanity committed during war" ?

The whole war crimes thing is kind of a farce, if we look at the Nuremberg counts 1 & 2; we must ask ourselves how was russia on the bench instead of in front of it? There are much better critiques than I can muster right now.

xiaoma• 15 years ago

That's a terrible idea. The US and China both have UN veto votes.

yaix8• 15 years ago

No, they have Security Council veto votes. This has nothing to do with the UNSC.

However, it would only be useful if nations like the US and China could be made to participate, so negotiating this would not be easy. At the end however, it would be beneficial for all participants.

Now, why would it be a bad idea? Any argument, or "just because"?

Zakharov2• 15 years ago

"Cyber warfare" has far more in common with international espionage than actual warfare. China and the US have been constantly spying on each other for 65 years, maybe longer. Rarely do such actions constitute grounds for a war.

The big differences now is that the espionage extends to a significant number of non-government actors, and that there's a greater degree of plausible deniability to any attacks. Still, the Chinese are capable of physically blowing up a lot of American infrastructure (and vice versa), and the Chinese may be capable of disguising a physical attack as a terrorist attack.

Cyber-warfare is another vector allowing states to attack each other, but it's still less powerful than conventional warfare, and not that much more powerful than conventional espionage.

dvfer• 15 years ago

Both governments are on the same team...total Control........

danssig• 15 years ago

This is just scare mongering nonsense. WSJ just keeps getting better and better.

tatsuke953• 15 years ago

I don't know about anyone else, but I felt this article had the vibe of:

"Guys! The internet is dangerous! We NEED a way to turn it on and off! It's for YOUR safety!"

tatsuke953• 15 years ago

Well, I won't be surprised when the powers-that-be put forward a plan for a "method" to cut us off from the rest of the internet. And it will be accepted, because they'll have convinced the public there are too many harmful cyber attackers out there. National Security, don'tcha know.

learc832• 15 years ago

Cutting us off from the rest of the world doesn't work, b/c it would be easy to deploy a botnet inside the US.

Richard Clarke: China's Cyberassault On America

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