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Site Contents: © Peter Sommer, 2012. Not to be reproduced without permission

PO Box 6447  London N4 4RX UK

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CyberWar, CyberWeapons, etc

My interest was stimulated in the mid-1990s when I was asked to advise solicitors to a 16-year-old North London schoolboy accused of masterminding a global hack into sensitive USAF,  military suppliers and other websites.  His co-conspirator, 19 years old, had an obsession with Area 51, the supposed US location of alien space ships.  Their activities was the subject of US Senate hearings as an exemplar of what was then called “Information Warfare.”  This was the point at which analysts spoke of an Electronic Pearl Harbor. The contrast between what the actual evidence showed and the initial fears of the US authorities of attack from Eastern Europe and Korea was vast.  Later I met both the UK and US investigators.

Public interest in the topic waned until 2007 when Estonia was temporarily threatened by a cyber attack.

Today my main research concerns are:

  • Problems of attribution  How do you work out who is attacking you?  And how much confidence can you have in your conclusions?
  • Cyberweaponry capabilities  What is actually required in the design and deployment of a cyberweapon?  What technical knowledge and intelligence about a target is needed for success?  Which cyberweapon scare stories can we dismiss?
  • Language  Is it reasonable to talk about “Cyber War”  when most events wouldn’t qualify for “war”?  Does the use of language mislead us into the nature of the problems?  Are we over-emphasising the role of the military as opposed to technical computer security,  contingency planning and public education?
  • Cyber disaster scenarios    How serious and viable are the various scare stories of projected cyber-triggered events?
  • Evaluation of accounts of alleged cyber attacks and cyber attack statistics  The public and politicians are much influenced by accounts of cyber attacks and statistics,  but how accurate are they?   What is the evidence for the anecdote, how was the evidence  acquired and who is providing it?  What are the statistics claiming to measure?  How is the data being collected?  If an anti-malware product registers and repels a virus:  does that count that as an “attack”?   Are the conclusions supported by the research methodology?
  • Cyber Security Policy:  International and National  Nearly all nations countries are evolving security policies.  What do they think the problems are and how should they be addressed?   Is national cyber security a task for the military, for the electronic intelligence agencies,  for the police,  for private sector critical national infrastructure companies?  Can you rely on a doctrine of deterrence if you know you’ll have difficulty in being sure you know who is attacking you?    What are the issues of developing an offensive cyber attack capability?  When and under what circumstances would it be deployed?  Is the “Internet Off Switch” a viable defence route?  Can you create a national cyber filter to repel attacks?  What are the practical problems of Public/Private Partnerships when the main duty of a privately owned company is to produce profits for its share-holders as opposed to securing a nation state?  What is the role of public education?   Is an international treaty a feasible aim or should nation concentrate on establishing accepted norms of cyber behaviour?

 

Readings

OECD published a study I co-wrote with Ian Brown: Reducing Systemic Cyber Risk  

 

The following Powerpoint slides may also be of interest:

Defining CyberWarfare,  Oxford Internet Institute, 2011

CyberSecurity:  the legal dimension,  Royal United Services Institute, 2010

Contingency Planning,  CyberSecurity 2010, Brussels