Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It by Richard A. Clarke, Robert K. Knake Page A
Authors: Richard A. Clarke, Robert K. Knake
Tags: United States, General, Computers, Political Science, Law Enforcement, Terrorism, Technology & Engineering, Military Science, security, International Security, Political Freedom & Security, Prevention, Political Process, Cyberterrorism, Information warfare
Ads: Link
collisions across the country. Pipelines carrying natural gas to the Northeast have exploded, leaving millions in the cold. The financial system has also frozen solid because of terabytes of information at data centers being wiped out. Weather, navigation, and communications satellites are spinning out of their orbits into space. And the U.S. military is a series of isolated units, struggling to communicate with each other.
Several thousand Americans have already died, multiples of that number are injured and trying to get to hospitals. There is more going on, but the people who should be reporting to you can’t get through. In the days ahead, cities will run out of food because of the train-system failures and the jumbling of data at trucking and distribution centers. Power will not come back up because nuclear plants have gone into secure lockdown and many conventional plants have had their generators permanently damaged. High-tension transmission lines on several key routes have caught fire and melted. Unable to get cash from ATMs or bank branches, some Americans will begin to loot stores. Police and emergency services will be overwhelmed.
In all the wars America has fought, no nation has ever done this kind of damage to our cities. A sophisticated cyber war attack by one of several nation-states could do that today, in fifteen minutes,without a single terrorist or soldier ever appearing in this country. Why haven’t they done it by now, if they can? For the same reason that the nine nations with nuclear weapons haven’t used one of them since 1945, because they need to have the political circumstances that cause them to believe such an attack would be in their interest. But unlike with nuclear weapons, where an attacker may be deterred by the promise of retaliation or by the radioactive blow-back on his own country, launching a cyber attack may run fewer risks. In cyber war, we may never even know what hit us. Indeed, it may give little solace to Americans shivering without power to know that the United States may be about to retaliate in kind.
“While you were on the line with the President, sir, Cyber Command called from Fort Meade. They think the attack came from Russia and they are ready to turn out the lights in Moscow, sir. Or maybe it was China, so they are ready to hit Beijing, if you want to do that. Sir?”
THE BATTLESPACE
C yberspace. It sounds like another dimension, perhaps with green lighting and columns of numbers and symbols flashing in midair, as in the movie The Matrix . Cyberspace is actually much more mundane. It’s the laptop you or your kid carries to school, the desktop computer at work. It’s a drab windowless building downtown and a pipe under the street. It’s everywhere, everywhere there’s a computer, or a processor, or a cable connecting to one.
And now it’s a war zone, where many of the decisive battles in the twenty-first century will play out. To understand why, we need to answer some prior questions, like: What is cyberspace? How does it work? How can militaries fight in it?
HOW AND WHY CYBER WAR IS POSSIBLE
Cyberspace is all of the computer networks in the world and everything they connect and control. It’s not just the Internet. Let’s be clear about the difference. The Internet is an open network of networks. From any network on the Internet, you should be able to communicate with any computer connected to any of the Internet’s networks. Cyberspace includes the Internet plus lots of other networks of computers that are not supposed to be accessible from the Internet. Some of those private networks look just like the Internet, but they are, theoretically at least, separate. Other parts of cyberspace are transactional networks that do things like send data about money flows, stock market trades, and credit card transactions. Some networks are control systems that just allow machines to speak to other machines, like control panels talking to pumps, elevators, and
Several thousand Americans have already died, multiples of that number are injured and trying to get to hospitals. There is more going on, but the people who should be reporting to you can’t get through. In the days ahead, cities will run out of food because of the train-system failures and the jumbling of data at trucking and distribution centers. Power will not come back up because nuclear plants have gone into secure lockdown and many conventional plants have had their generators permanently damaged. High-tension transmission lines on several key routes have caught fire and melted. Unable to get cash from ATMs or bank branches, some Americans will begin to loot stores. Police and emergency services will be overwhelmed.
In all the wars America has fought, no nation has ever done this kind of damage to our cities. A sophisticated cyber war attack by one of several nation-states could do that today, in fifteen minutes,without a single terrorist or soldier ever appearing in this country. Why haven’t they done it by now, if they can? For the same reason that the nine nations with nuclear weapons haven’t used one of them since 1945, because they need to have the political circumstances that cause them to believe such an attack would be in their interest. But unlike with nuclear weapons, where an attacker may be deterred by the promise of retaliation or by the radioactive blow-back on his own country, launching a cyber attack may run fewer risks. In cyber war, we may never even know what hit us. Indeed, it may give little solace to Americans shivering without power to know that the United States may be about to retaliate in kind.
“While you were on the line with the President, sir, Cyber Command called from Fort Meade. They think the attack came from Russia and they are ready to turn out the lights in Moscow, sir. Or maybe it was China, so they are ready to hit Beijing, if you want to do that. Sir?”
THE BATTLESPACE
C yberspace. It sounds like another dimension, perhaps with green lighting and columns of numbers and symbols flashing in midair, as in the movie The Matrix . Cyberspace is actually much more mundane. It’s the laptop you or your kid carries to school, the desktop computer at work. It’s a drab windowless building downtown and a pipe under the street. It’s everywhere, everywhere there’s a computer, or a processor, or a cable connecting to one.
And now it’s a war zone, where many of the decisive battles in the twenty-first century will play out. To understand why, we need to answer some prior questions, like: What is cyberspace? How does it work? How can militaries fight in it?
HOW AND WHY CYBER WAR IS POSSIBLE
Cyberspace is all of the computer networks in the world and everything they connect and control. It’s not just the Internet. Let’s be clear about the difference. The Internet is an open network of networks. From any network on the Internet, you should be able to communicate with any computer connected to any of the Internet’s networks. Cyberspace includes the Internet plus lots of other networks of computers that are not supposed to be accessible from the Internet. Some of those private networks look just like the Internet, but they are, theoretically at least, separate. Other parts of cyberspace are transactional networks that do things like send data about money flows, stock market trades, and credit card transactions. Some networks are control systems that just allow machines to speak to other machines, like control panels talking to pumps, elevators, and
Similar Books
