While I do not often read magazines like “Business Week”, I was stuck in a Doctor’s office, and they did not have a single car magazine (cretins). But lo and behold, this magazine actually had a great article, about the growing threat of government sponsored electronic espionage. While attacks on government websites are nothing new, the sophistication and pace of these attacks show that they are more than simply kids with too much time on their hands. These attacks are incredibly complex, involving observation of the target of the attack, and emails that can easily pass the scrutiny of the person reading them, because they seem to be genuine in every respect.
Now if I had to bet, I would have said North Korea was behind attacks such as these, because lets face it, their leader is nuts. But according to officials with CERT (computer emergency readines team) and the Pentagon, most attacks are traced to China. And for some reason, a fair amount of these attacks come from a server known as 3322.org. While 3322.org is theoretically simply a site where you can register a domain name (as in whatever.com), it seems to be quite the favorite of those launching e-attacks on the U.S. The founder says he can not possibly be responsible for the actions of those who simply register a domain name with him, it is somewhat of a paradox as to how Chinese authorities who strictly regulate the Internet have not noticed these attacks, or at least the malicious code. This would seem to be “plausible deniability” brought to the implausible level.
While some say that criminal elements are behind such attacks, there isn’t a great deal of logic to that. Organized crime, no matter what country it was in, would seem to profit very little from such large scale electronic espionage, and as to why organized crime would target governement sites like the Pentagon is any ones guess. I suppose they could hack into government sites, and then sell this information, but as to how they would successfully thwart the interference of the Chinese government is another matter. Plus, organized crime is the enemy of essentially every government, so I doubt it would be very long before even the bitterest of enemies would join forces to eradicate such a threat.
While the U.S. government has enacted a project known as “Byzantine Foothold” in order to make the nations most sensitive information more secure, many security experts worry that the Internet has become too unwieldy to be tamed, and whatever measures are taken will of course be defeated given enough time and effort. On January 8, President Bush signed the “Cyber Initiative” order, the aim of which is to significantly overhaul security protocols within the government. And knowing our government, we will farm this work out to foreign countries because they can do it cheaper.
For years, military planners kept pushing for new technology and better synergy between elements of our armed forces, and while these systems are supposedly secure, in the world of computers, nothing is ever so secure that it cannot be hacked. While these cyber attacks are worrisome, what really bothers me is that we’ve found them. It’s like we found these exploits too soon, and China is a long way off from using such exploits to defeat such technology on the battlefield. Not that they won’t have that power soon if we do not figure out a way at least to slow them down, but I can’t help but wonder if the actual aim of the cyber attacks is not merely to gain the information in the files, but more importantly, our response. If they can counter any response, and can gain control of the electronics we now count on, then they have already won the next battle, if not the war.
