Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It by Richard A. Clarke, Robert K. Knake Page B

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    What makes these networks a place where militaries can fight? In the broadest terms, cyber warriors can get into these networks and control or crash them. If they take over a network, cyber warriors could steal all of its information or send out instructions that move money, spill oil, vent gas, blow up generators, derail trains, crash airplanes, send a platoon into an ambush, or cause a missile to detonate in the wrong place. If cyber warriors crash networks, wipe out data, and turn computers into doorstops, then a financial system could collapse, a supply chain could halt, a satellite could spin out of orbit into space, an airline could be grounded. These are not hypotheticals. Things like this have already happened, sometimes experimentally, sometimes by mistake, and sometimes as a result of cyber crime or cyber war. As Admiral Mike McConnell has noted, “information managed by computer networks—which run our utilities, our transportation, our banking and communications—can be exploited or attacked in seconds from a remote location overseas. No flotilla of ships or intercontinental missiles or standing armies can defend against such remote attacks located not only well beyond our borders, but beyond physical space, in the digital ether of cyberspace.”
    Why, then, do we run sophisticated computer networks that allow unauthorized access or unauthorized commands? Aren’t there security measures? The design of computer networks, the software and hardware that make them work, and the way in which they were architected, create thousands of ways that cyber warriors can get around security defenses. People write software and people make mistakes, or get sloppy, and that creates opportunities. Networks that aren’t supposed to be connected to the public Internet very often actually are, sometimes without their owners even knowing. Let’s look at some things in your daily life as a way of explaining how cyber war can happen. Do you think your condominium association knows that the elevator in your building is, like ET in the movie of the same name, “phoning home”? Your elevator is talking over the Internet to the people who made it. Did you know that the photocopier in your office is probably doing the same thing? Julia Roberts’s character in the recent movie Duplicity knew that many copying machines are connected to the Internet and can be hacked, but most people don’t know that their copier could even be online. Even fewer think about the latest trick, shredders that image. Just before all those sensitive documents pass through the knives that cut them into little pieces, they go by a camera that photographs them. Later, the cleaning crew guy will take his new collection of pictures away to whoever hired him.
    Your elevator and copier “phoning home” is supposed to be happening, the software is working properly. But what if your competitor has a computer programmer who wrote a few lines of code and slipped them into the processor that runs your photocopier? Let’s saythose few lines of computer code instruct the copier to store an image of everything it copies and put them into a compressed data (or zip) file. Then, once a day, the copier accesses the Internet and—ping!—it shoots that zip file across the country to your competitor. Even worse, on the day before your company has to submit a competitive bid for a big contract—ping!—the photocopier catches fire, causing the sprinklers to turn on, the office to get soaked, and your company to be unable to get its bid done in time. The competitor wins, you lose.
    Using an Internet connection you did not know existed, someone wrote software and downloaded it onto your photocopier, which you did not even know had an onboard processor big enough to be a computer. Then that someone used the software to make the photocopier do something it wouldn’t otherwise do, short-circuit or jam and overheat. They knew the result would be a fire. They probably