First post

This is not what I had intended to be the post to begin my new blog and it's much longer than I had anticipated. However, a news item has recently caught my eye: the attacks to Estonian Internet infrastructure that may or may not have been perpetrated by Russia, with which some have already started using colourful terms like Internet warfare and the 1st cyber-war. As I am not well-versed in the history and politics behind the relationship between Estonia and Russia, nor am I an information security expert, I won't try to discuss the technical details of the attacks or the particulars of the incidents. I'll leave that up to more knowledgeable and interested parties. There is, as always, the ever-increasing swamp of online articles, columns, commentaries, and blogs available covering this situation.

The story, as far as I'm aware of it, is that between April 26 and May 18 of this year, there were a number of distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks on Estonian computer networks. I believe an analogy can be made to deliberately sending a flood of vehicles and pedestrians in order to create a massive traffic jam that clogs up a country's entire transportation system. And for exactly the same reasons, a massive DDOS attack on a country's networks can conceivably bring it to a standstill. These attacks peaked on May 9th and 10th when the largest bank in Estonia, Hansabank, is forced to shut down its online banking network.

These attacks have been associated with an Estonian government decision to relocate a World War II memorial that was erected when Estonia was still a part of the U.S.S.R. This is where it all starts getting hazy because initially there were allegations that the Russian government was directly responsible for these DDOS attacks. However, there are now other sources who say that the Russian government wasn't responsible, and that it was a group of independent Russian citizens with nationalist tendencies. It appears that the exact origin of these attacks is hard to trace because of the many computers located around the world that became involved in delivering these data floods. In other words, no one is quite sure who is ultimately responsible for bringing down the Estonian Internet infrastructure.

This uncertainty is quite the problem because disabling a country is, on the world stage, a bad and hostile thing to do. And, of course, everyone wants to know who is responsible, what can be done so that this won't happen to them, and how to punish the bad guys once they are found. However, given the difficulties that the experts have had in defending against and tracing these attacks, this is turning out to be quite a beast of a problem. Unfortunately, I can't answer these questions and I only have more of my own.

I found this situation very interesting because it relates to some ideas I've had about the Internet and its effect on modern lives and lifestyles. Namely, in a near future when the Internet is as ubiquitous and essential as water and electricity are now, what would happen if the Internet went down? I had considered a number of social and logistical ramifications, but hadn't anticipated some of the ones that have already appeared in the Estonian situation. For example, the shutdown of banking systems, emergency services, and other facets of everyday life that are built upon an underlying backbone of communication.

It's also interesting because even though hackers and hacktivists have been poking holes, defacing websites, and bringing down selected computer networks for fun, profit, or ideological awareness for some time, this could conceivably become something much larger and, hence, very different. As I understand it, these sorts of activities have been performed by relatively small groups of individuals in the past. Whether condoned by national governments or not, the idea of Internet warfare raises a whole new idea of how these sorts of things can happen. No longer will hacking be limited, at least ideologically, to the realm of one-off, unannounced and unexpected potshots on relatively small computer systems and performed by relatively small groups of individuals. In the language of early warfare, the hackers we are accustomed to hearing about are like raiding parties. By extending the analogy, it is then possible that hacking can develop into more complicated practices and patterns that are more similar to things like siege, ambush, guerrilla warfare, and other more complicated strategies. The fortifications employed to defend against these kinds of attacks will have to evolve correspondingly. (Moat-and-bailey defenses are no good against mortars or bombers.)

On the other side of Internet warfare is the economy. It has always played some part of conventional warfare in terms of the access to resources and the effective application of these resources for use in warfare. In the past, (as in Starcraft,) if your nation was richer, then you could buy more expensive and advance weapons, train more troops, move more units. However, how does that map to Internet warfare? Relatively speaking, computers and Internet infrastructure are inexpensive and widely accessible. It would appear to me that the emphasis in effective Internet warfare is more heavily based on the ingenuity and skills of the combatants, where the weapons need to be programmed, than in conventional warfare, where the weapons can be made by an uninvolved party and bought. As far as I know, these sorts of attacks take some degree of skill and know-how in terms of commandeering other computers, obscuring the trail, understanding the mechanics and complexities of a computer system, that is not as easily solved by the brute force methods that can be employed in conventional warfare. Suddenly, due to the widespread use of computers, relatively poor countries or countries that have not maintained standing armies and collections of weapons are now in possession of the means to attack larger, richer countries.

There is also the obvious consequence of conventional warfare where people get injured and die. So far, this has yet to occur in the realm of cyberspace, but is it possible? How dependent on the Internet will our society become with such possibilities on the horizon? Will we web-enable every facet of our lives in spite of it? Or will we shy away from Internet-based solutions for more Luddite approaches due to it? How real is the threat to our lives? Or is it only a threat to our lifestyles?

Back to Estonia: I have a number of questions that I would like to see answered regarding the idea of Internet warfare. First of all, how can you find the real perpetrators? Due to the distributed nature of the Internet, it can be hard to track the attacks to the original group of computers. But once you do that, how do you find the people who did it? Can a few manage a large-scale attack? Or does it have to be many? Should computers be monitored if these large-scale attacks become more frequent? Should computer use then become controlled and regulated? And if you find the people who did it, how do you determine that the government of a country is definitively responsible or affiliated with these attacks? Specifically, what would a government have to do or not do in order to be in support of or condone such actions? Is it implicit in freely giving public access to the Internet? Or citizenship? Ideology? How far does a government have to go to stop its citizens from executing these attacks before it cannot be held responsible for the actions of renegade individuals?

What does territory mean on the Internet? What does this all mean for international peace treaties, relations, and regulating bodies? How can you be sure, or at least without a reasonable doubt, that you are retaliating against the right people? What form would that retaliation come in? Is a corresponding Internet attack enough? Do you physically attack their Internet infrastructure? Would physical attacks be considered an escalation of the situation?

How do you keep it from happening again? Should there be national firewalls and security measures in place? Is it a plausible solution? Will nations become isolated islands in cyberspace? Should programmers, IT professionals, and people with such "dangerous" skills be tracked? Regulated? Are they national weapons or resources? Should there be standing armies made up of professional hackers and Internet security experts? Would they be our new snipers and sappers? This is starting to sound a little extreme, spawning from the world of Ghost In The Shell, but due to the inherent differences between Internet warfare and conventional warfare the methods currently employed to deal with these sorts of situations seem to be a little ambiguous and ill-defined. It sounds like something that could be very different from what we know now, and could mark a turning point for conflict resolution, development, and international relations.

On the other hand, I could be wrong. But there's definitely a lot to think about, and I'm interested to see how things develop.