Cyber Battles, Phoney Wars

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Cyber Battles, Phoney Wars

by Binoy Kampmark / March 29th, 2013

It is sometimes hard to yawn when it comes to cyber catastrophes and predictions of global internet meltdown, but the latest round of clashes in the global internet backyard has some experts worried. This is exactly what has been happening for a week, with London and Geneva based Spamhaus waging a battle against a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack from Dutch hosting company Cyberbunker.

It seems so childish, which is what you expect when you start surrendering conventional battlegrounds to adolescents. With names like Spamhaus and Cyberbunker, the teenagers are running riot with their lingo and their barely pubescent attitudes riddled with angst and acne.

Victims in the battle – a term to be used advisedly – have included Netflix and an assortment of other famed websites, though one can’t help but get the feeling that there is much in the way of gong, and little in the way of dinner here. What seems to be happening is a gang land battle between computer nerds rather than any meaningful confrontation.

Suggestively, Spamhaus makes its business battling those naughty unwanted messages that make their curving way into an email account. The way it does so is through blacklisting servers it believes are responsible for the heinous activity, meaning that you will be free from such emails as, “Mr Wong has a business offer for you.” Blacklisting does come at a price, as it might involve cutting another company’s grass.

Some companies responsible for hosting servers do take offence, which is exactly what Cyberbunker did when it made it to Spamhaus’s naughty list. It would seem that the sin of Cyberbunker was its libertarian approach to hosting websites, more or less everything bar terrorism-related activities and child pornography.

The opening shots were then fired, with Spamhaus being attacked by a DDoS comprising a heavy 300 gigabits per second, a staggering amount when one considers it is three times that needed to take down government sites. Similar attacks against bank sites tend to be in the order of 50 Gbps. According to Cyberbunker’s Sven Olaf Kamphuis, Spamhaus had become something of a self-appointed dictator in cyberspace, a moral policeman determining “what goes and does not go on the internet.”

Computer analysts have been keen to see the fall out from this cyber skirmish as something of considerable magnitude. According to Arbor Networks, a firm that earns its bread with protective programs against DDoS attacks, it was one of the biggest attacks on record. “The largest DDoS attack that we have witnessed prior to this was in 2010 which was 100 Gbps,” claimed the company’s director of security research Dan Holden (BBC, Mar 28).

The response from such news outlets as the BBC was dramatic. “Global internet slows after ‘biggest attack in history,’” seemed melodramatic, but it was based on the accounts of specialists keen to impress audiences about gloomy prospects. Professor Alan Woodward of University of Surrey was happy to add to the image of global internet paralysis. “If you imagine [the internet] as a motorway, attacks try and put enough traffic on there to clog on and off ramps.” In this case, the traffic was so heavy, jams were likely.

Oddly enough, the portents of calamity have barely been registered by users and consumers of the internet. Hardly anyone has actually noticed a more than usual sluggishness in services, and organisations monitoring the state of the internet found “zero evidence of this Dutch conflict spilling over into our online backyards” (The Guardian, Mar 28).

A more traditional approach, as reported in the Washington Post (Mar 28) would be to sever the internet cables altogether, an attempt of which was recently made by divers against Telecom Egypt.

Spamhaus claims that the attacks have been contained, and it has supporters from numerous large companies (Google, for one) that have an interest in spam filters. The “slowing” has, for that reason, been far from noticeable. This would suggest that organisations like Spamhaus can withstand major attacks, while many governments and banks are incapable of doing the same, at least for now.

A redistribution of power has taken place before our very noses (and mouses), and the cyber teams in the employ of the state should start taking note. The question here is what they should be guarding against. This, according to Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin, is already being done in the US. General Keith Alexander, head of Cyber Command at the Pentagon, claims that 100 cyber teams are at work defending mainly military networks.

Even given this cautionary note, when the proof comes out of this overdone pudding, we might find that this entire episode had less to do with cyber disruption than public relations. One can, at least for the moment, place orders via Amazon with comfort.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne and can be reached at: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

This article was posted on Friday, March 29th, 2013 at 8:00am and is filed under Censorship, General, Science/Technology.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/03/cyber-battles-phoney-wars/

Pentagon Gears Up For Global Cyber Warfare. China Accused of Cyber Espionage

By Stop NATO

Global Research, March 29, 2013

Global Times

Region: Asia

Theme: Militarization and WMD, US NATO War Agenda

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According to Reuters, Shanghai Jiao Tong University is the latest “collaborator” with the PLA [People's Liberation Army] to engage in “cyber espionage.” The reason was that

“Reuters found at least three papers on cyber-warfare on a document-sharing website that were co-authored by university faculty members and PLA researchers, ” whereas in most developed nations, “university professors in recent decades have been reluctant to cooperate with operational intelligence gathering units.”

Washington has set up military units to launch cyber warfare, with 13 offensive cyber warfare units. This is way more serious than the “suspected” deal that involves the PLA. Nevertheless, China receives more accusations from Western media of “government- backed cyber attacks.”

China has been the focus of finger-pointing by Western media, and the Chinese government has been behaving in a cautious way. It’s beyond imagination and China’s political reality that the Chinese authorities, under close watch by the West, are vigorously waging a cyber war against the US.

In terms of Internet security, Western public opinion incorrectly thinks that China – which has never been at the forefront of Internet technological development and suffers from much more serious cyber attacks than the US – is the one which should receive supervision. This mirrors the hegemonic situation enjoyed by Western interests.

A widely recognized code of conduct in cyberspace hasn’t been established. And yet there are no clear definitions of cyber espionage and cyber warfare. Washington still has the final say in this regard, and other Western countries simply echo the US. The US, while publicly forming cyber war units, pretends to be the defender of cyber justice.

It’s hard to change Western dominance in terms of international public opinion. But Chinese should remain cool-headed.

It’s a pity that some Chinese netizens follow Western media and criticize so-called unethical cyber conduct by the Chinese government. There are also idealists who believe “global interests” should top “national interests.” Today most globalists are in developing countries, because their proposals have long been marginalized in the developed world, especially in the US. Mainstream public opinion in the West always cries out to prioritize their national interests.

Western countries have teamed up on the Internet security issue, which reflects their deeply rooted attitudes toward China. Beijing has little hope of changing this.

A cyber war may erupt one day, but it’s possible that there won’t be any public announcement beforehand, and such cyber warfare may be waged every day. It’s hard to tell how cyber wars will undermine the existing world order and whether they will turn into military clashes between countries.

The Chinese public needs to stay calm and united.

We must have the capacity to safeguard national security on the Internet, and launch counterattacks to punish cyber invaders who dare to launch cyber wars against us.

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