Why Political Scientists Need to Know Computers and Networking

[Deering, Brian R.]

Is attacking a country and disabling its infrastructure an act of war? What if the weapon is a computer (or millions of computers)?

Quoted below is an article from the current issue of Scientific American regarding what it calls "the first recognized cyberassault in the world." While I doubt that specific claim (I know that our military sites are constantly being probed by the Chinese, Russians, and Israelis, among others) the article certainly raises an interesting question.

Key Terms:

"Bot" - a small piece of code that travels the Internet and executes repetitive tasks faster than a human could do. Search engines use bots to index Websites. Some bots lodge themselves onto unsuspecting computers and hijack computer operations. That's what happened here.

"Denial of Service" - This is what happened in Estonia. Millions of bots were lodged on computers around the world and, in orchestration, sent false requests to Estonian government and financial institution computers. The receiving computers respond to all requests until they become so overwhelmed that, in practical terms, they are no longer responsive to legitimate requests.

"Cyberwarfare" - is the use of computers and networks to conduct warfare in Cyberspace.

For more on this attack see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_Cyberwar

I'll monitor NATO activity in hopes that I can catch new policy when it's made.

Brian

 

"Is bombing an air base equivalent to hacking into its computer system? Both can cripple the base, but is a software strike an act of war? That is what NATO wants to decide fast, after the first recognized cyberassault in the world—on Estonia, one of its member states.

 
"This past April and May many of Estonia’s government and banking Web sites came under heavy network attack, ostensibly orchestrated by the Russian diaspora in various countries and by the minority Russian population in Estonia. They were apparently protesting Estonia’s moving of a Soviet war monument from the center of Tallinn, the nation’s capital, to a war cemetery. The attackers hijacked millions of computers worldwide by sneaking in “bots”—programs capable of wresting control of the machines and turning them into unsuspecting foot soldiers of cyberwar. The computers then overloaded Estonian servers with false requests. This invasion resembled the Code Red attacks in 2001, which deployed close to a million bots [see “Code Red for the Web”; SciAm, October 2001]. This time the silicon army exclusively targeted the government infrastructure of a country, which by most other means would constitute an act of war.

"Not having a policy on this unprecedented “cyberterrorism,” NATO member states could do little to aid Estonia, which joined in 2004. That should change soon: in June, NATO representatives met in Brussels and assigned top priority to drafting a policy on cyberwarfare. No one expects that the effort will be simple."

by Sourish Basu
Scientific American, Updates, p20, September 2007.

 

 

 

Check out my personal project: http://groups.google.com/group/tet_project/

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