Sometimes my friends and colleagues wonder why I fixate on cybersecurity and the Internet. I tell them all the time that it is the single most important and misunderstood problem in the world today, but often I don’t think they understand the scale of the problem. So it was fascinating to see this end-of-year summary of the incredible things that happen on the Internet every minute. It isn’t often that we get a good understanding of just how BIG the Internet really is. So, consider: Today there are more than …
The scene from “Casablanca” says it all. “I’m shocked-shocked to find that gambling is going on in here,” Police Inspector Renault declares. Immediately, the croupier hands the chief inspector his roulette table winnings. Renault’s disingenuousness disclaimer could be the tag line for U.S. cyber security policy. Just last month, the Director of National Intelligence delivered a report to Congress – “Foreign Spies Stealing U.S. Economic Secrets in Cyberspace.” Its “shocking” conclusion: China and Russia are stealing us blind. Quelle surprise! Chinese beachheads in U.S. cyberspace have turned up time and again for …
For the masses in repressive regimes like Iran, the Internet represents the last bastion of freedom of expression—but not for long. Early this year, Iran announced its plan to create a cyber army, 25,000 strong, to strengthen state control of the Internet. But why should the Iranian government waste its time controlling and filtering the Internet when it can create its own? Scratch the World Wide Web—here comes the Iranian Wide Web. While Iran was once a leader in Internet access in the Middle East—it was the first Muslim nation …
Earlier in the week, the media reported the Pentagon’s position that a serious cyber attack might require a military response—to which the only logical response is: You think? Now we have the findings of a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey that 53 percent “of voters agree with this proposed new strategy and think a major cyber-attack on the United States by another country should be viewed as an act of war.” Here, the only logical question is: What is wrong with the other 47 percent of the people surveyed? …
In a new Heritage in Focus, Heritage visiting fellow Paul Rosenzweig discusses cyber warfare. Click here to listen. Cyber attacks now constitute an act of war. Computer infrastructure plays an ever-larger part of our lives, from power grids to defense systems. Sabotaging it is unacceptable, as the recent revelation by the Pentagon declares. But when is a cyber attack serious enough to constitute an act of war? And does cyber warfare appear to be the future of warfare? Listen to the answers to these questions and more. For the full …
Writing in 1995, before anyone in the West thought all that much about war online, Major General Wang Pufeng (the former Director of the Strategy Department at the China’s Academy of Military Sciences) observed, “Our sights must not be fixed on the firepower war of the industrial age. … Rather they must be trained on the information warfare of the information age.” “In the final analysis,” General Pufeng added, “information warfare is conducted by people.” And China has a lot of people. For over a decade, China has been building …
The report today from the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission is chilling but not terribly surprising. According to the commission (pages 243–44): For about 18 minutes on April 8, 2010, China Telecom advertised erroneous network traffic routes that instructed U.S. and other foreign Internet traffic to travel through Chinese servers. Other servers around the world quickly adopted these paths, routing all traffic to about 15 percent of the Internet’s destinations through servers located in China. This incident affected traffic to and from U.S. government (“.gov”) and military (“.mil”) sites, …
By now most people are familiar with the ongoing debate about how far government should be able to go in monitoring Internet communications. Such was the topic of a recent discussion at the Voice of America building in Washington, D.C. Judging by the remarks of the event’s panelists, especially those of Ambassador Philip Verveer, the State Department’s Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy, there seems to be a considerable diversity of opinion within the government itself on the issue of cyber security. There are some very good reasons for …
A recent war game simulating the National Security Council’s response to a cyber attack highlighted the United States’ serious vulnerability to such an attack in an era where it is increasingly important to prepare for the potential consequences of cyber warfare. The war game, in which several former government officials tried to manage the commercial and economic crash resulting from the collapse of the internet and cell phone service, indicates that the U.S. needs to do more to prepare for the worst case scenario. Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair …
#4: A Cyber Leadership Deficit There has been a lot of talk about cyber security over the last few months. The Obama Administration named it as one of its number one homeland security priorities. Everyone in Washington has an opinion about what should be done from regulating the private sector to more research and development. There is also disagreement over who should take the lead. Some plans start with the private sector, some start with Congress. Others think the White House should direct the strategy for cyber security, and there …
