Cyberwar and Information Warfare

Daniel Ventre

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781848213043
• eBook ISBN: 9781118603512
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Information Technology
• Index: Computer Science

Integrating empirical, conceptual, and theoretical approaches, this book presents the thinking of researchers and experts in the fields of cybersecurity, cyberdefense, and information warfare.
The aim of this book is to analyze the processes of information warfare and cyberwarfare through the historical, operational and strategic perspectives of cyberattacks.
Cyberwar and Information Warfare is of extreme use to experts in security studies and intelligence studies, defense universities, ministries of defense and security, and anyone studying political sciences, international relations, geopolitics, information technologies, etc.

Chapter 1

Cyberwar and its Borders ¹

In recent decades, military ideology has produced a plethora of concepts, each time indicating a “new war” or a never-before-seen method of war. These are all supposed to reflect evolutions in technology and emerging political factors (and all of them must be sent to the dusty shelves of history, as a “classic” or “Clauswitzian” war¹).

The non-initiated person struggles to find his place between asymmetric warfare and fourth generation warfare (4GW), and image warfare and information warfare. He will find it difficult to grasp the slight difference between the PSYOPS (psychological operations) and public diplomacy, and a computer network exploitation (CNE), infodominance, electronic warfare, or I-War².

Yet, in this flowery if not conceptual language, at least one term follows a media criterion: cyberwar. The term is contested by those who, much like the author, believe that it is not truly a war. Businesses selling security products often use the term for indicating facts which unmask simple, self-interested criminality, and by no means, a real conflict… But cyberwar is upon us, and we must pay homage to a success which it is not forbidden to question or even explain.

1.1. The seduction of cyberwar

Can we lead a conflict with, by, and against computers and networks? This hypothesis is indeed attractive, because several factors are involved:

Everybody has, at least once, been subjected to a computer attack, often a relatively benign form of malware (viruses, “malicious” software, which has made him/her lose time in repairs or adjustments). Even if the damage only seems minor (a few hours where the machine has stopped working, the time and energy needed to get anti-virus software or find a solution for the breakdown), each person has had the feeling that a hostile force was attacking them from the interfering machine (and after all, if just a few lost hours are irritating for one person, it may have dramatic consequences for services, a large organization or a country).

An Internet user, John Doe, was a victim, or almost, of phishing (who has not received a request from a mysterious person promising a percentage of an enormous money transfer?). For most of us, these cons or attempts at information theft have hardly led to much damage (except for a few unfortunate people who had personal data, and sometimes money, stolen, or even more seriously, had their identity hacked by con artists pretending to be them). But more still, the average citizen may be faced with the intrinsic dangerous nature of the computer + network combination, even if it is in a toned down way: falsification, bait files, paralysis, invisible and remote intrusion, destruction or substitution. There are as many new situations as attacks on the goodwill or security of the internet user who may start to suspect the system’s intrinsic danger. He can easily grasp that cyber security is a major issue and involves enormous budgets. He may also imagine the chaos that might be let loose for a Nation which depends on electronic networks, if acts such as these were to multiply, or if State services could do with their royal finances what hackers manage to do with their limited resources. This mainly consists of intruding on someone’s privacy, their secrets for example, or looking for a way to disrupt them (disorder, breakdown, etc.). As the citizen was able to feel the vulnerability of their own machines (after all, if they had been properly armed with sufficiently resistant cryptology systems, useful security procedures, good anti-virus software, good firewalls, etc., meaning if they had been more careful then nothing would have happened), then they may comprehend the flaws in general informational systems and take from it that the seriousness of the attack would indeed be decreased.

The idea that the weapon of knowledge – a way of producing algorithms, of revealing secrets, of discovering flaws which allow the weak and cunning to send a whole country into chaos – is like something from a novel, if not intellectually stimulating. It has managed to fuel an entire literary and cinematographic movement.

A science fiction novel, The Shockwave Rider [BRU 75], described a cyberpunk, the hero who was already fighting the authorities by sending worms into computer networks with an oppressive power. The imagination (pirates, chaos and electrons) preceded the effective spreading of cyberattacks.

From Softwar, a science fiction novel published in 1984 by Thierry Breton [BRE 84] to the latest video games, including Digital Fortress [BRO 98] (author of Da Vinci Code), the figure of the scientist when discovering with dismay that the computer (which the whole country depends on) has been compromised has become a stereotype. We can add to this the infinite number of films or series whose plots include an electronic virus put into the computer by demon intelligence.

In a more academic listing, nearly twenty years ago, think-tanks greatly increased studies on cyberwar and developed increasingly more worrying scenarios. In 1993, with a ground breaking article by Arquilla and Rondfelt, we too knew that Cyberwar is coming [ARQ 93]³.

Ever since, the reports, plans and cries of panic have multiplied, whether addressed to the President of the USA or to the latest Davos Forum⁴. These are often doubly classified as either apocalyptic or utopic.

In the first case, the world is warned against a technological catastrophe: the collapse of great nations which, through a lack of solid defense systems, could be brought to their knees by disorganizing digital attacks. To give just one example, in February 2010 a few weeks after the Obama administration named a cyber czar who was responsible for all these matters, it was followed up by an exercise known as the cybershockwave which simulated a computer attack on the USA⁵. Michael McConnell, who was Head of National Intelligence from 2007 to 2009, declared in front of the American Senate Committee, “If we went to war today in a cyberwar, we would lose”⁶.

In the second case, 21^st Century policy makers plead (or rather pleaded, because inspiration somewhat dried up after September 11^th), for a high-tech, newly considered, resolutely post-modern war, where information superiority would practically stop resorting to force.

The terminology of cyberwar spreads via acts which range from economic espionage to computer sabotage. The media’s interest in the matter (and in cybersecurity discourses, which are not always objective, and which wrongly use terms of war or terrorism) have made the idea popular. It is not lacking in foundations, seeing as every four to six months Western information systems go under attack. They are often said to come from Russia or China and considered as being serious enough to constitute as acts of war, at least enough to create diplomatic problems. As for political and international governmental organization heads, they are referring more and more to a hypothesis of cyberterrorist danger, without always clearly distinguishing communicational facilities – terrorists use the Internet to express themselves, to recruit, to spread messages, to get information, to instruct, exactly like every other user – and the harmful capacities that they could lead to in cyberattacks. For the moment these hypotheses remain theoretical.

The image of cyberspace is rather eloquent. Why does the human desire to fight and destroy not take place in this space? The vision of the Internet is naturally becoming “a new battle ground” or offering a new “dimension” (the fifth dimension after the earth, sea, air, and stratosphere) to conflict that which is established by the power of metaphors.

1.2. Desirable, vulnerable and frightening information

In short, we are getting used to the idea that cyberwar (above all virtual, for the time being) is inevitably going to break out on a large scale. Moreover, our future vulnerability will be proportionate to our present dependency, with regard to our prostheses which are supposed to compute, monitor and memorize everything for us, but also to bring us together.

Another decisive element, the notion of information warfare, in spite of or thanks to its lack of precision, has been easily established as a promising project for the strategist (saving violence by information, bringing conflict into the perspective of technology and information society), a slogan for the politician (declaring him/herself as a victim of information warfare will stigmatize the opponent and explain, sometimes at a low cost, why public opinion does not believe what we might want it to). Here, there are four kinds of information:

– data which is stored somewhere, which can be quantified, transported and reproduced;

– circulating messages and particularly the “news” which describes world events;

– knowledge or belief systems which are built into the human brain;

– programs carrying instructions (such as genetic codes or software algorithms).

Of course, without counting for the fact that, if information is immaterial, then it depends on material supports: systems, vectors, networks, memories, etc., which are all susceptible to being altered, blocked, sabotaged, violated (to seize information), hijacked – which could be subjected to conflicts and seizures of power. In today’s usage, “information warfare” may have several meanings:

– “lies, propaganda, manipulation”, on an international scale (according to which side of the camp we are on, we will accuse, for example, the Israelis or Palestinians of poisoning Western journalists, of inventing fake victims or mass graves, of having accomplices working in the French press which censor news which may not be in their favor, and yet may exaggerate other news). In the current context, the term “information warfare” is used by the media as a synonym for the war of images or confrontation used by propaganda. It would be more precise, in this restricted meaning, to speak of “war of information”, meaning the “news” that we see, hear, or read. The definition would then be: conflicts, maneuvers, the polemics which concern the representation the public makes of military events;

– “destabilization, accusation before public opinion, starting rumors, subversion”. For example, the campaigns led by NGOs against large businesses, or the rumors which go around on the Internet to do with some industrial accident, or some pollution. But the term may also be applied to operations of communication, lobbying, or other operations led by specialized organizations supporting economic interests: helping a company within a hostile tender offer (TO) framework, supporting the tobacco or weapons industry, by reassuring consumers or influencing international organizations and other manifestations of what some are calling “public relations” and what others are calling “lying industries”;

– a definition which is close to industrial espionage or electronic surveillance;

– a technological definition where it is a matter involving harmful software, sabotage of vital infrastructures and taking power over the millions of “zombie” computers;

– a military definition where it is a matter of making the battle ground “transparent”, of having “informational dominance” over the enemy, and of leading “psychological operations”.

In more theoretical articles, information warfare is described as being a general dimension of strategies in information society. Thus, we are referring to a war by, for, against information, meaning moves which are illegal but still aggressive and which are intended to either:

– spread a point of view in favor of its objectives, or to weaken a rival by a discourse and/or attacks which may damage its image as well as its information systems;

– gain decisive knowledge in order to win control over a market, a technological superiority, lead a military or political operation;

– counter the enemy’s or competitors’ moves compared to that of public opinion or decision-makers (refuting its propaganda, its slander, its proselytism, its attempts to destabilize) but also ensuring the safety of its own information systems against an attack by being overloaded with a site, virus, or other “malware”.

These alternations go from the military to the political, from the economical to the technological, from the psychological to questions of security. For the first, this means applying Sun Zi principles. For the second, it means buying good software. For the rest, it is a question of controlling the media.

1.3. Conflict and its dimensions

On the other hand, we could support the fact that there has never been a conflict without an information strategy, and that each time we must answer the questions which already preoccupied Greek Sophists and Chinese generals:

– How do we make the other believe what we desire, whether it is a matter of persuading them through reasoning, or deceiving them by a ruse?

– How can we know what he does not know? Or how do we know what he does not know, but what we do know?

– How do we make the other predictable and elusive? Make ourselves elusive.

Military information warfare also includes information in the sense of “data”, when it is a question of computer data and communication systems. See the section on high tech in the Revolution in Military Affairs, the changes brought about by art in order to take over computers, networks, satellites, intelligent weapons, etc.

Offensive techniques are changing; they paralyze adverse communication networks, they send vital infrastructures into disorder, etc. In addition, they integrate digital technologies into the recognition of objectives, data transmission, the coordination of armed forces, the management of intelligent weapons, etc.

If we take it up a level, information warfare is also a war of information as knowledge. Having informational dominance is like having an exact and global representation of the situation, enabling a suitable and instantaneous strategic decision, whereas the opponent is thrown into the fog of ignorance. Therefore, it is a matter of a structural condition of military superiority (because this presumes, prior to everything, equipment and the belief that structures and mentalities will adapt to the information revolution).

To a certain extent, the “stro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Introduction
• List of Acronyms
• Chapter 1. Cyberwar and its Borders
• Chapter 2. War of Meaning, Cyberwar and Democracies
• Chapter 3. Intelligence, the First Defense? Information Warfare and Strategic Surprise
• Chapter 4. Cyberconflict: Stakes of Power
• Chapter 5. Operational Aspects of a Cyberattack: Intelligence, Planning and Conduct
• Chapter 6. Riots in Xinjiang and Chinese Information Warfare? 285
• Chapter 7. Special Territories
• Conclusion
• List of Authors
• Index