Page 50 - Cyber Warnings

CYBER WAR OF NATION-STATES:

TARGETING

by Geoffrey Nicoletti, Independent Research Analyst

Taking down power grids as the first priority in nation-state cyber war is a myth. Actually, the
first priority is taking down the adversary's counter-strike capability. "Assets" and "timing" are
critical here.

If you miss striking at some of the adversary's assets (and you will because they are “hardened”
or unknown to you) how much damage will the adversary still be able to do? The model of
ICBMs is somewhat useful.

There is a limit to what an ICBM can do even with multiple warheads---it is not carrying 100 of
them. But there is no limit to a Tao Group cyber asset: unleashing multiple attacks upon multiple
targets a multiple number of times---the granddaddy of an APT. Furthermore, ICBM's can be
intercepted if it is all a mistake and human beings can be involved because of a seven minute
window, but not in cyber war: the attack is measured out in milliseconds to nanoseconds.

I emphasized "timing" in my "Nanosecond Warfare" article (Jan. 2017 issue). To strike more
quickly than your enemy, you engage in low-latency attacks and you rely on algorithms of
automatic analysis of metadata.

This is risky (but unavoidable) because transactional memory concurrency programming is
relatively new. In this article I want to emphasize “targeting”.

The initial problem for those in the position of counter-striking is the attribution problem. Such a
massive incoming attack upon them would seem to give away whether it is North Korea, Iran,
China, or Russia hitting you.

But the attack will seem, at first, to be coming from inside one’s own systems and then it will
seem to be coming from a certain country (but it will be the wrong one). Therefore (N. Korea,
Iran, China, Russia and our allies---like England) all are in a first-strike mode. IF there is ever a
nation-state cyber war, WE better be the ones firing first...

To avoid the above scenario, nations are learning to engage (offensively, not defensively)
through the use of citizen hackers. Why? Because and despite attribution challenge… who shall
we target? And what will your retaliation be?

John F. Kennedy in October of 1962 refused to go to war with the Soviet Union because ONE
U-2 pilot over Cuba was shot down...do I need to say more? "Fancy Bear" of Russia comes to
mind and we can imagine Unit 61398 of China has trained citizens also; we can imagine the
NSA has done this via corporate Intelligence contractors.

50 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – July 2017 Edition
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