Hack attack
An independent research firm has called on the US government, law enforcement agencies and corporate IT firms to pull their collective socks up in the fight against global cyber terrorism.
A study entitled "Cyberdeterrence and Cyberwar," by not-for-profit research organisation, RAND, claims nations dependent on externally accessible computer networks for utilities like power and phone lines, as well as things like banking and military command, are in grave danger of being undermined in a powerful, coordinated cyber attack.
"Adversaries in future wars are likely to go after each other's information systems using computer hacking," said Martin Libicki, a senior management scientist at RAND and one of the report's authors.
Libicki explained that lessons learned from traditional warfare would be of no use faced with computer warfare, noting "Cyberspace must be addressed in its own terms."
Key problems in the fight against cyber terror include the fact that the ‘weapons' are rather "amorphous," with hacking tools being almost impossible to track or control. Also, the fact most military networks use the same hardware and software as civilian networks leaves them even more vulnerable to attack.
The report is all the more poignant in the wake of last Wednesday's co-ordinated crackdown on over 100 cyber criminals in a joint US-Egyptian operation dubbed Phish Phry, the largest cyber fraud prosecution of its kind.
Libicki writes that Cyber warfare is ambiguous and, therefore, it's hard to determine how destructive a cyber attack could be. Recent cyber attacks have cost the US anywhere from a few billion dollars to hundreds of billions of dollars a year, a not insignificant sum.
But because it's not always easy to identify the attackers or understand their motivations, RAND urges governments and security agencies to work together cross country and cross jurisdiction to neutralise threats together.
RAND suggests the US government use diplomacy as well as economic and prosecutorial pressure as a preventative measure against wide scale cyber attack, of which there's generally no opportunity to counterattack once the damage has been inflicted.
