Electronic Pearl Harbor awaits
International conflicts previously fought with bombs, bullets and ballistics are now being waged with bugs, bytes and botnets, targeting critical infrastructure which is Internet-connected and computer-controlled.
In an all-out covert cyber-war, the Pentagon, International Monetary Fund, Google and Silicon Valley have all been hijacked and hacked. The new arms race features a major shift from being a kinetic battle to focusing on espionage, jamming, destroying and camouflaging cover-ups for stolen codes and intellectual-property theft, while crippling an enemy’s power grids, water supplies, fuel pipelines, banking systems, nuclear facilities, chemical plants, satellites.
“Hacktivists” in the unregulated cyber-weapons industry sell to the highest bidder, with virtually untraceable immunity. According to the think-tank Technolytics, the worrisome threat imposed by cyber-weapon development increased more than 600 per cent from 2010 to 2011. The most prevalent risk factor is human culpability. The US may have the mightiest military in the world, but it is also the most digitally wired, the notoriously insecure Internet making the overdeveloped nation unprepared and vulnerable to cyber-assault. The US National Academies declared: “Today’s policy and legal framework for guiding and regulating the use of cyber-attacks is ill-formed, underdeveloped and highly uncertain.”
An estimated 100 nations are now amassing offensive cyber-military capabilities, largely in secret, led primarily by the aggressive US-Israeli alliance. The cyber-weapons programme dubbed Olympic Games involved malware attacks including Stuxnet, Dugu and Flame, all geared to thwart Iran’s nuclear aims. Explaining Washington’s involvement in launching cyber-attacks and unmanned killer drones, a State Department “expert” said “the end justifies the means”. In an interconnected world now immersed in a continuous series of troublesome cyber-conflicts, cyber-militias have been formed in China, Estonia, France, India, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan and Russia.
Survival on our endangered planet depends upon making sane, safe decisions on how best to consolidate and monitor agreements related to cyberspace, similar to the initiatives to protect against nuclear proliferation. The problem is that some nations will likely once again refuse to participate.
Charles Frederickson
Bangkok
