Hackers in Cyberwar

Following my attempts to link cyberwar to robotics, I mean to link my CAJ topic to yet another one: Hacktivism. As you all can probably imagine hackers play a central role in the ongoing cyber conflicts and could play an important role in a future cyberwar.

The first example I want to mention is the cyber conflict that took place in 2012 between Israeli and Saudi Arabian hackers, sometimes even whole teams of hackers. During the ongoing cyber conflict, the credit card information of thousands of Israeli credit card holders was revealed on numerous websites. Those attacks lead to counterattacks, which lead to more counterattacks, causing increasing damage to innocent civilians. Hackers attempted to uncover the other hackers’ identities. Meanwhile the following attacks revealed the passwords and e-mails of thousands of people, official websites, including stock exchange sites, were targeted and taken down. Even though these attacks did not physically hurt the residents of both Israel and Saudi Arabia, numerous people suffered partly great financial losses.

As the cyber arms race continues, military thinkers and governmental advisers attempt to persuade the US government to recruit elite computer hackers. John Arquilla, a professor of defence analysis at the US Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, mentions that the brilliance of hacking experts is needed, as the US’ cyber technology is not as sophisticated as the technology its foes use to launch cyber attacks.

The main problem of this plan is that hackers and the government are not quite on good terms, mainly due to the lengthy jail terms for hacking. Arquilla estimates that there are only around 100 master hackers in the world, most of them situated in Asia and Russia. This is another reason why security agencies should exploit the talent and abilities of those genius hackers that are actually willing to work for them. He mentions that it is possible to stop militant organizations such as Al-Qaeda by disrupting their communications.

Arquilla stresses that he did not fear a full-scale cyberwar on the U.S, but instead multiple, small attacks which could lead to hundreds of billions of dollars in losses. Russia, China, even North Korea own highly sophisticated computer systems and know their strategic uses, but the average American system is completely helpless when he is used in some hacker’s botnet. With simply recruiting computer hackers, the U.S military could save millions of dollars and regain its position in the cyber race.

Sources:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/jul/10/us-master-hackers-al-qaida

http://thenextweb.com/me/2012/01/18/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-ongoing-israeli-saudi-hacker-struggle/

Have Cyberwarfare and Drones Revolutionized Warfare?

As I already did in my lost blog post, I will try to concentrate on linking my CAJ topic to that of another student, concentrating once again on robotics. While doing some research on cyberwar linked to robotics, I came upon an article in the New York Times, informing about how robotics and cyberwarfare revolutionized warfare.

As proof of this assumption, the Battle of the Coral Sea, in which naval forces from Japan fought against the allied forces of Australia and the US, is mentioned. This was the first act of war in which carrier fought versus carrier, an inevitable result of the development of air, radio and radar technology. In military affairs this battle was considered a revolution. The revolution continued as nuclear and space weapons developed, but the most recent advancements in military capabilities include cyberwarfare and, of course, drones.

The authors of the article believe that the revolutions in military affairs of the 21^st century will be dominated by advancements in software and hardware. They introduce drones as military weaponry able to increase the strike distance of the military, while simultaneously placing no lives at risk. A great problem of these drones, however, is the fact that basic jammers could easily disrupt their ability to function properly.

Just as drones, cybertechnology is a method that succeeds in extending the military’s reach while protecting lives from real harm. A great example for this type of attack is the Stuxnet worm, which I have already introduced in a precedent blog post. Cybertechnology allows hackers to gain access to computers all over the world, even if those don’t have direct Internet access. With the infrastructure currently in place, satellites and fiber cables, a good code could be an extremely effective weapon. This shows that cybersecurity becomes more and more important and should not be underestimated.

Cybertechology and unmanned vehicles both have one great advantage: they make it hard to identify the source of the attack. There is a risk that both technologies will make it easier to wage war, as there are not that many lives at stake any longer. In the future, man sitting in front of computers might be the soldiers of the upcoming wars.

According to the authors, the U.S is doing well in wanting to train new security and cyber professionals. They are worried though, that there is currently an inadequate number of leaders and experienced engineers that develop those future warriors. The authors stress the importance of both robotics and cybertechnology in future warfare, emphasizing that those two cannot be separated. The underlying problem remains, that the nation’s leaders might never know the moral, social and political consequences that the use of cybertechnology and unmanned vehicles in war could lead to.

Drone Wars – When Cyber War becomes Real

In today’s post I will attempt to link my CAJ topic, cyberwar, to the CAJ topic of another student, namely robotics. I followed Bianca’s blog for quite a while and in one of her posts she wrote about drones and military robotics in general. I think that this topic can be linked quite well to cyberwar.

In the last few years an arms race has been going on, specializing in the creation of unmanned military equipment. In 2008, for example, about 12,000 ground robots were used in war. Congress has decided that by 2015, one third of all military ground vehicles are to be unmanned. Just as the with ground robots, Arial drone technology is advancing rapidly.

As I already mentioned in my last blog post, there has been a hype going in about cyberwar, even though the instances of cyberwar that have happened up to now point more to espionage and sabotage than to a real act of war. This would, however, change if these automated war machines were to be hacked and if a virus would suddenly change their intended target.

There have already been situations when military robots have acted erratic and acted upon by external sources such as electronic interferences. This has not yet posed a problem, but if this happened to armed robots, the consequences could be serious. An example for these disturbances are electronic jammers, often used in US vehicles to prevent improvised explosive device (IED attacks) can cause drones flying overhead to crash.

Already now many military, as well as civilian, computer systems are under constant attacks, so we can imagine that it is only a matter of time until automated military systems will be targeted as well. Up to know, luckily, no instances of automated systems being affected by viruses or attacked by hackers have been reported. If somebody would, however, succeed in injecting a code into these systems, allowing them to remote control military drones, a real cyberwar might ine day become reality.

Sources

http://cyberarms.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/drone-wars-when-cyber-war-becomes-real/

There won't be a cyberwar?

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/new_scientist/2013/09/cyberwar_and_cyberattacks_it_s_really_espionage_subversion_or_sabotage.html

While researching my CAJ topic I recently found an article saying that cyberwar has never existed and probably never will. I generally do not like arguments that try to prove that something will never happen, for the simple reason that we can never say for sure that it won’t.

Anyways, the author of this article reasons that we cannot call the ongoing conflicts in the cyberworld a cyberwar for several reasons. According to him there are three features that are needed for cyber conflict to be considered cyberwar. First of all, the computer breach would need to be violent and able to hurt or kill people. Otherwise, so the author suggests, the attacks could not be described as an act of war. He further mentions that the act of cyberwar would need to be instrumental and compel the other to do something they would generally not even consider doing. Lastly, he mentions that there has to be a political motivation behind those attacks.

If those features define a cyberwar, we have not yet experienced one. Up to now there has been, according to the author, no injured person as a consequence of a cyberattack and there has been no nation yet that has taken credit for a cyberattack. As it is possible to cause an electricity blackout or interrupt a city’s freshwater supply or even to attack industrial control systems though, a cyberwar is definitely possible. Up to now, this has luckily never happened.

The author further explains that cyberespionage, a quite usual activity of cyberattacks, as well as cybersubervsion, the act of using social media to undermine authority, is not and cannot be considered cyberwar. In general he even says that the concept of cyberwar is misleading, as it is not violent, as a real war should be. The last comment he makes on cyberwar is, that the armed forces need to stay focused on fighting and winning the real wars of the future.

Of course I understand the reasoning used in this article and if it all of the author’s facts are true; it is possible that we have yet to experience a real cyberwar. We know, however, that cyberwar could happen in our world that is so dependent on technology. I personally think that one day cyberwar will happen, as it is the perfect opportunity for countries with little power and a small population to fight their opponents.

The difficulties of tracing a cyber attack back to the attacker

What is true for the Stuxnet worm and the Estonian cyberwar is true for most cyber attacks, mostly the sophisticated ones among them.  In general, it is difficult to trace the attacks back to the original attacker and to find the real culprit behind the many attacks on another nation. The reason for this is quite simple. No intelligence service launching attacks on another nation would want to leave footprints that could lead back to them. They would want to deny their involvement in the stealing of data etc. and to proclaim innocence.

In addition to that, the more sophisticated opponents can easily hide their footprints by launching their attacks from a third country. And let’s be honest here: There are a lot of communication facilities around the world that could easily be hacked and used for an attack. China is one of those countries that are especially susceptible to being used as a platform for third-country-cyberattacks. The reason for this are its poorly secured networks, that hackers have no trouble taking over. China’s network is so vulnerable, because security practices are generally poor and because more than 90% of the software used in China is pirated. This makes it hard to obtain security updates and patches. More than three quarters of Chinese computers are generally found infected with malware. Just as vulnerable as the Chinese networks are American universities, as their large networks must be accessible at all times to hundreds, maybe thousands of students. This makes them especially vulnerable to misuse as a platform for cyber attacks on other American facilities.

In short, it can be said that just because an attack can be trace back to China, this does not necessarily mean that China is behind those attacks. The problem is that every nation has certain countries that it suspects of wanting to steal classified data or attack its industrial facilities. If an attack is traced back to one of those countries, the victim might not even think about investigating further for finding the real culprit.

Another aspect of cyber criminality that changed greatly in recent years is the availability of sophisticated hacking tools. In the past only well-established intelligence services had the power to launch cyberattacks. Nowadays, even a small virtual community of skilled cybercriminals could cause the same amount of damage. A large corporation might therefore just hire cybercriminals to steal certain data.

Cyber espionage is probably the form of attack that had benefitted most from the rise of the internet, as “information that once required physical access or recruitment of agents can now be downloaded from afar.” China is continuously copying the U.S military and even developed computer network operations capable of attacking U.S information centres and probably even infrastructure in the event of a conflict. Not only China, but also Russia, France, Israel and even North Korea own similar programs.

Even so, the main goal of all these attacks is to remain unnoticed and to have covered your digital footprints well enough in case the attacks are noticed by the victim. What matters is not really who is attacking, but how to secure data in general. This could be done by authenticating users, encrypting data, regular patching and of course by monitoring the systems for intrusions.

Famous Cyber Attacks: #2 Estonian Cyberwar

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/cyberwar43z/2012/12/21/estonia-ddos-attackrussian-nationalism/

The Estonian Cyberwar will not go down in history as the first example of a real, full-scale cyberwar, but probably as one of the largest coordinated cyberattacks up to now. It is important to clarify the fact, that the Estonian cyberwar cannot really be classified as cyberwar, as it only had minimal impact on the Estonian economy.

The whole incident started out in 2007 with the Estonian government planning to relocate a memorial of WWII, the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn, from its original place. This led to tensions between the ethnic Estonians and Russian-speaking immigrants in Estonia and even strained relations between Estonia and Russia, as the protests regarding this relocation became more and more numerous.

The whole situation ended with countless cyberattacks, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, on Estonia, which lasted for several days. The main targets of these attacks were Estonian banks, news agencies, private Estonian companies as well as government websites. Though these attacks lead to a slowing-down of commerce and to several hours of offline servers, the real-world damage of these attacks was only minimal.

Evidence suggested that the attacks were of Russian origin, though it was not clear whether the Russian government had played a role in the attacks or not or whether the whole thing was the work of patriotic Russian hackers. Only two years later it was found out that the perpetrators of the attack were members of the Nashi youth group, a state-affiliated organization.

The Estonian cyberwar has not become famous for its scope or uniqueness, but for the fact that it established cyberattacks as a political weapon. Through cyberattacks, a nation achieves the power the silence another nation, to take over its infrastructure and destroys their ability to communicate with the world outside its borders.

We still do not know whether or not a full-scale war could be the result of cyberattacks, or a cyberwar, in that case. What we know is that there is an ongoing arms-race taking place in the cyberworld, but we are unsure about how it could affect the lives of civilians.

Napalm Girl Descriptive Paragraph

In this black-and-white photograph, five children can be seen running on a street towards the viewer of the photograph. All of them look quite malnourished and seem to be fleeing from something. The boy in the foreground on the left side of the picture has his eyes closed and his mouth wide open in a look of despair and immense fear. The girl in the middle of the picture is naked, running away with an expression of fear and distress on her face. A young boy and girl, following her on the right side of the picture, are holding hands as they run. The smallest of the children is following behind on the left side, slightly turning back towards the four soldiers following them. Unlike the children, the soldiers, who are loosely holding their guns, look fairly relaxed. Empty fields spread to each side of the slightly wet road and the thick smoke in the background covers the sky.

Kristina, Sandra, Markus

History of Photography - Narrative

Version 1:The story of my life, the story of photography

There are dozens of people, dressed completely in black, who are watching me carefully. As soon as the coffin leaves the house, the descendants and acquaintances of my former owner start to discuss which of her many artistic possessions, meaning us, should now belong to whom. Had I been able to, I would probably have laughed in this situation for this is not the first or second time I am going to change owners and each and every time the same situation repeats itself. My constant change in owners, however, is only normal, as I was created in 1844. I can proudly say that I am the 170-year-old Daguerrotype of Louis Daguerre himself.

There are very few people in this world who know that the process needed for creating a Daguerrotype such as me is long and difficult. Photographs like me are taken through exposure of iodized silver plates to light. Those plates are insensitive to light, which leads to a long exposure time, and extremely expensive.  The worth of one plate is as much as that of fine jewellery. So back when I was created I was one of the most expensive possessions of my owner.

While people used to admire photographs such as me, they were also quite fearful of us, suspecting that the faces that resembled them so much could be watching them. Sadly, however, my whole life went through a change the day people realized that they could retouch negatives. Suddenly the mirrored image of their faces was not enough for them anymore, they wanted perfection. If their hair was not completely straight in a photograph they could just edit it later on. This, however, was not the worst of the inventions of photography that was yet to come. Clients even started to request reproductions of their photographs, created by a process that they called “mezzotint”. This process robbed images of their uniqueness and their famous “halo”, which gave our photographs that certain aura of prestige.

Though I am now worth several thousands of euros, the decline in taste when it comes to photography has deeply wounded me. People now make weird V-poses in front of these cameras that are apparently digital and can send them to everybody online. The fact that photographs like me remain though, has led to the revival of old photographs with hundreds of photographers trying to revive style of photography through which we were taken.

Feedback:My peers generally liked my text but mentioned that they could not find a conflict or goal in my story. They also mentioned that I used too much information and therefore did not concentrate enough on the narrative style of my story. So the advised me to use a bit less information and concentrate ind telling the photograph's story instead.

Final Version: The struggles in life of a 170-year-old Daguerrotype

As the first rays of light fall through the dusty windows, dozens of people, dressed completely in black, enter the tiny room and flock around the numerous pictures on the walls. Dust has settled on most photographs’ ebony frames. As soon as everybody has settled around the coffin, located in the middle of this stuffy room, the minute’s silence begins. Soon the silence is broken by quarrelling about who should inherit the many artistic possessions of my former owner. I watch the dispute with the inherent pride of a 170-year old Daguerrotype photograph. That is what I am: An original photograph of Daguerre himself, taken in 1844. Throughout the centuries I have changed owners many times and there is, as always, a single question on my mind: how will my new owner treat me?

My first owner, Daguerre, was the proud inventor of the camera obscura, the precursor of these tiny digital cameras the youth uses nowadays. Of course, when the first camera was invented, having your photo taken was an extremely long and expensive process. Back then iodized silver plates were used to create photographs, a single one of them worth as much as a fine piece of jewellery. Only the elite of society could therefore afford to have their photos taken. Those plates were also insensitive to light, leading to long exposure times. Daguerre therefore treated me with the utmost respect; handling me as though I was the most precious possession in his household, which I probably was.

I was later handed down to his ancestors and had to experience the decrease of prestige in photography. People started to leave their house when they had their pictures taken, returning with images that showed them with weird props in the background, which marked the beginning of studio photography. Worse, people had learned to reproduce photographs with a process called mezzotint, which led to the loss of the halo in photographs, an effect created by long exposure times. People had soon learned, however, to recreate this effect by using the gum print. Consequently, my worth decreased and each following owner handled me with less care.

My train of thought is interrupted by a hand grabbing me. “Mum, I want this one. This one is prettier than all the rest”. I want to smile. My life suddenly seems to go through a change once again.

CAJ Rhetoric Analysis

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2410931,00.asp

In his argumentative text “Cyber War? Bring It On!” John C. Dvorak undermines the credibility of recent publications mentioning the imminent threat of cyber warfare by making several assumptions seem ridiculous.

The pathos in this argumentative text was only partly convincing, as the author mainly tried to establish his own credibility by undermining the credibility of other authors. Dvorak, for example, stated that none of the assumed cyber terrorists could possibly have the intention to start a cyberwar. This is either due to their close interaction with the “targets” of cyber attacks, or because they simply do not possess the means to start a cyber war.

Dvorak succeeds, however, in making good use of ethos in his article, as he takes on the role of a calming friend who refutes one by one, each claim that believers of the theory of an oncoming cyberwar make. What is even more important, he makes those claims look ridiculous in his readers’ eyes and therefore makes them feel embarrassed for having taken those claims seriously. The effect of this use of ethos is, that readers start to believe that the threat of cyberwar is nothing but simple “fear-mongering”.
The logos in this text is also well succeeded, as Dvorak logically links his ideas with each other and gives detailed explanations for each of his train of thoughts. He mentions, for example, that a similar situation of panic spreading within the population due to a computer programme already happened in the past and that this threat had turned out to be quite harmless. He even gives credit to the usefulness of the momentary situation, in saying that this new threat might lead to improved cyber security.
All in all, the article is quite convincing, though the author could have done a better job in convincing his reader by establishing himself as a more credible personality.