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Cyber War Part 1

As we move towards January 2000, I hear more discussions concerning the level of disruption that will occur due to the Y2K problem. My own consulting business has been flooded with requests by smaller companies to upgrade systems in preparation for the millennium bug. In part, we find ourselves in this situation due to the success of technology. What we fail to recognize is the fragile nature of the technology we all enjoy. We take for granted the lights will work when someone hits the switch and water comes out the kitchen faucet because you turn a handle. Granted these are relatively simple forms of technology compared to the intricacies of firmware, software and hardware, but no one took those technologies for granted 100 years ago.

Most of us have experienced the frustration when our desktop operating system decides to get sick. Ten years ago, Windows was a novelty; today we expect it to work. The difference between Vietnam and the Gulf War was the type of pictures we found on our television. Vietnam became an endless litany of body counts, firefights and an enemy that seemed to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The Gulf War had the look and feel of a Nintendo game. The bombs had nose cone cameras as they hit bridges, factories and convoys.

We came to expect the same level of expertise in Kosovo. We took the technology for granted. Indeed the B2 bomber found its first action in Kosovo using satellite guided two thousand pound bombs (not you father’s bomb). We used up our entire supply of air launched cruise missiles and had to buy an inferior and less accurate one from Israel to continue the bombing campaign.

If we examine Vietnam, Iraq and Kosovo as three points along a timeline, there is one inescapable conclusion: the United States military is increasingly dependent on advanced technology to project significant firepower at the point of attack.

Technology is fragile.

The use of technology from global positioning satellites to high-speed computers to stealth technologies applied to missile, planes and ships places the United States military at the top of the food chain. It also exposes an incredibly soft under belly. For example in 1998, it is estimated over 280,000 cyber attacks took place against military and defense related computer systems. That’s roughly 770 attacks each day. Some percentage of those attacks came from people using computers similar to ones sitting on your desktop.

Earlier this year, a computer virus attached itself to emails and once opened, the virus mailed itself to the first fifty entries in the computer’s address book before it started to erase everything it could find on a hard disk. During the Kosovo campaign, it is reported that one of Britain’s defense weather systems was shut down due to actions taken by Serbian programmers. The effect was incomplete or missing weather data for bombing runs in theater. Communist China recently published a document declaring cyber war to be as significant a form of warfare as the traditional air, land and sea forces we commonly associate with conflict. Many are beginning to view the virtual information infrastructure to be as vital a national asset as power grids, water systems and road nets.

The United States Marine Corps ran an exercise using laptop computers linked to major combat information systems. The idea (and it is a brilliant one) was to place in the hands of a squad leader (a squad being eight soldiers) the same information available to the general prosecuting the action. Proper information management has proven beneficial to businesses large and small, certainly in a combat situation, the people who know the most have a better chance of prevailing.

Guess what, technology failed. Batteries did not keep their charge, keyboards gummed up from rain and mud. Buildings with heavy concentrations of metal got in the way of the network links necessary to make this all work. Some might characterize what was spent on these specialized laptops a boondoggle. Business goes through this process everyday. Find the bugs, fix them and try it again.

Technology is fragile.

Therefore, what happens when someone decides to attack a military or civilian information infrastructure and how would they accomplish the mission? Check back next month.

Douglas De Bono / DouglasDeBono.Com Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota E-Mail readermail@DouglasDeBono.Com