10.14.12
I was on Voice of America
U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has revealed some details of U.S. plans to deal with a massive cyber attack. Those plans include launching a possible cyber-offensive in what some analysts say is a message to Iran.
With thousands of enemy cyber-actors probing the Pentagon’s systems millions of times a day, the secretary of defense has spoken about the threat of a massive cyber attack before. But his warnings late Thursday in New York have been the strongest yet.
“This is a pre-9/11 moment. The attackers are plotting,??? said Panetta …
Gary Schmitt, a security analyst at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, sees Panetta’s strong remarks as a message for Iran.
“This is Secretary Panetta essentially saying ‘this is enough.’ It somewhat reminds you that cyber warfare is the kind of warfare that impinges on being terrorism,??? said Schmitt. “So, Iran, the tens of thousands of computers that it shut down in the Gulf, it would be the same thing as if an Iranian agent were to throw a bomb into a room with a variety of servers.???
Critics of that message include George Smith, a cyber specialist at Globalsecurity.org, whose job for several years has been to analyze the U.S. government’s assessments of cyberthreats. He said Iran’s capabilities are not as developed as those of the United States, and he believes issuing warnings about cyber attacks may actually encourage Tehran to launch them.
“They came to the game late. In cyberspace, it’s basically an arms race, so people are going to be spurred by what they perceive other people to be doing.???
It’s worth defining the American Enterprise Institute as a standard right-wing think tank that would virtually automatically advocate for a war with Iran.
Voice of America had a nice chat with me and I remarked at one point that it took a lot of gall to warn about Iranian cyberattack after we’d been poking that nation with directed malware, the equivalent of digital pointed sticks, for awhile. We were throwing our bombs into their digitized control rooms, so to speak, first. And many computer security specialists, inside and outside the government, surely understand it.
Do you think this unfair?
I went over the issues in greater detail here and at GlobalSecurity.Org on Friday.
And you should pass it around in social media, in spite of being afraid the name will soil you among peers, if you’re as sick of the deadening Cult of Cyberwar’s central hypocrisies as I am. It’s been well over ten years of this stuff, since before I became a Senior Fellow at GlobalSec, after 9/11.
And, believe me, it’s been all downhill since then. The topic of cyberwar has been virtually changed into another third rail issue, one in which the debate is not a debate or an attempt to inform at all, but only a regular stream of dire announcements and proclamations on what must inevitably occur: The country will be made a dysfunctional ruin in an afternoon of Internet mischief if agendas aren’t attended to immediately.