COMMUNICATIONS: General Sun and Warfare in Cyberspace

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Gonzalez

Mar 27 1997 (IPS) - The Chinese General Sun Tzu, wrote a classic text on military strategy more than 2,500 years ago that is viewed today as the guiding principles of “cyber warefare.”

“An able leader is able to defeat enemy troops without warfare..conquer cities without laying siege,” Sun noted and his words best describe the battles of the coming millennium, observes the Chilean electronic magazine Interra.

Luis Cordova, editor of Interra, says the list of real and potential “info-enemies” range from mischievous hackers to anonymous computer- whizzes who serve an aggressive power. Their presence is accordingly generating defense strategies and counter-attack tactics.

Cyberspace warriors will not be as identifiable as “Zodiac Paladins” or heroes from “Star Wars”. Instead, they will be well-dressed consultants and engineers equipped with armaments that are totally foreign to conventional understandings of aggressive conflict, says Cordova.

Other experts in communications agree.

Future combatants in virtual warfare scenarios will employ microphones and earphones, portable computers, electronic sensors, special eyeglasses to scan vast quantities of processed information, digital orientation instruments and a host of other sophisticated tools. They would be aiming to breach and infiltrate computer networks in order to destroy information systems, to substitute spurious data or alter data with an eye to spreading disinformation.

North America’s Institute for Advanced Warfare and Information Studies defines cyber-war as “the defensive or offensive use of computer science and information systems to exploit, corrupt or destroy an adversary’s computers or information systems, while simultaneously protecting one’s own”.

The Institute continues its analysis saying that “these types of activities are aimed at gaining advantage over military or commercial opponents”.

Computerized information warfare began in 1980 when groundbreaking linkage was first established between telecommunications and computer science thus permitting the creation of vast information systems that have culminated in today’s Internet. Since then, and particularly in recent years, cyberspace has witnessed numerous episodes attributable to “computerized belligerence” but the whole issue has fostered a certain degree of paranoia.

In other words, say the experts, there is always the risk of attributing to third parties any sort of virus that infects defense, financial or governmental computer systems, thus magnifying the importance of presumed vulnerability. In turn, there is a tendency to create control and censorship mechanisms that are not ultimately desireable.

Last November, the web page for the Sixth Ibero-American Conference in Chile was altered by hackers who placed pornographic pictures into the official portfolio of photographs of conference delegates.

In another incident in December, the electronic mailboxes of billionaire Bill Gates, preacher Billy Graham and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, collapsed simultaneously. All three suddenly found themselves linked up to some 10,000 discussion groups which flooded the trio’s e-mail boxes until they broke down under the weight of electronic saturation.

The culprit was the “Unamailer”, an American hacker, as notorious as he was mysterious.

At the end of 1996, the U.S. Air Force web page was penetrated by invaders, still unknown, who changed its contents, forcing the Pentagon into shutting down its 80 web sites. A year earlier, the Pentagon commissioned a study by the Rand Corporation which, through an army of “hackers” proved that 88 percent of the Department of Defense’s 9,000 computers were vulnerable to unauthorized entry.

Examples of cyber-aggression abound and the overwhelming majority of these are acts classifiable as common crimes, such as the appropriation and unauthorized use of credit card numbers, or activities tied to insurgency or terrorism, with networks invaded by guerrilla or racist messages.

The basic conclusion of cyber-war theorists is that information systems are vulnerable and therefore defense and counterattack strategies must be developed in direct relation to the degree of enemy aggression.

Interra points out that there are now three levels of cyber-war starting with “hackers,” whose simple mischief is often confused with criminal behavior.

The second level is that of cyber-war that resembles the work of hackers as far as invading systems to disable them or corrupt them with the introduction of a virus or erroneous data, or simply to steal information.

But in cyber-war, the attacks are not the isolated acts of hackers and are carried out with a precise objective: “to interfere or destroy enemy information systems, either governmental or of a corporation,” Interra says.

“And the third and final level of ‘net war’ or network war, aims to attack an entire nation, affecting not only its information systems but also the citizens of that country.”

Net war seeks “the interruption of services and the dissemination of messages designed to confuse public opinion, channeling great quantities of propaganda,” the magazine opines.

Daniel Brandt, an analyst cited by Interra, notes that there is a tendency to “find substitutes for war before peace is achieved” and he warns that “in the hearts and minds” of North Americans, “a substitute for the cold war may well be cyber-war.”