The war over the Internet

If you leave the door open to your house, and someone enters and steals some items, you don’t say you’re at war. You’ve been robbed certainly, but you’re not in a state of war.

I completely agree with Sam Roggeveen’s sentiments over at The Intepreter regarding the cyber warfare rhetoric that is doing the rounds in both within Australian Government circles and also in the media.

While I have written about it before, I do find it very interesting that nation-states like the US and Australia can seemingly easily lay blame for network intrustions on the shoulders of nation states like China. Now I don’t expect for a second that they don’t have experts advising them on how networks like the Internet function, it is interesting how network connections from IP Addresses allegedly within China, become ‘Chinese Hackers’ and then morph into ‘China’.

While I’m not for a second claiming that Chinese security personnel are not engaging in a form of espionage (Citizen Lab in Canada is doing a lot of interesting research work on these issues), one should be aware that IT security professionals are well aware at how easy it is to spoof IP Addresses and route traffic through other countries on their way to other destinations. I frequently find that the articles on cyber-attacks and cyber war gloss over the question of how one knows where exactly an attack or network intrusion comes from.

Buzan’s and Waever’s ideas on ‘securitisation’ seem so obviously applicable here in the way cyberwar is being discussed, particularly within contemporary Australia politics. Call me paranoid, but my fear is that these alleged ‘cyber attacks’ are being increasingly discussed as existential threats in the hopes the government’s around the world can increase their control over the networked domain. We have seen with the likes of Wikileaks that the Internet doesn’t always exactly play nice with the interests of governments.

The reality of these attacks is, at least to me, that many of these network intrusions come down to poor IT infrastructure and security protocols domestically. Other nodes on the network exploit these weaknesses. Opportunity knocks. Don’t leave your doors open.

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Perhaps of interest, here’s an address by IT Security expert Marcus Ranum talking about how the analogies of war don’t work in cyber space.

Some other commentary from around the web:

• Hacking incidents and the rise of the new Chinese bogeyman
• Nationalism on the Internet