Rainblog

From time to time, the topic of ‘cyberwar’ comes up in the media, usually accompanied by breathless speculation about the impact on our lifestyle when They (whoever They are) finally launch Their attack on Us, and sometimes by a picture of a steely-haired Air Force general who has been charged with keeping us all safe. No one knows exactly what a cyberwar will look like (my best guess: ridiculously long ping times) but everyone is sure that it’s only a matter of time. When the cyber-attack hits, our electronic defenses will be overwhelmed in a heartbeat and the shattered nation - unable to download Justin Bieber clips, shop on Amazon or receive timely Farmville updates - will suffer a collective collapse of morale that will render us easy pickings for foreign invaders. Something like that, anyway.

This kind of thinking is oddly reminiscent of NATO’s picture of a Warsaw Pact invasion of Europe in the 1980’s, except that instead of tank divisions pouring through the Fulda Gap it’ll be rogue Chinese packets flooding across Comcast and Level3.net. But just as the long-expected armored invasion never materialized and we had to hastily retool our war-fighting plans to take on hirsute fanatics in the cities of Iraq and the mountains of Central Asia, it’s possible that the coming cyberwar won’t look exactly the way we expect.

In fact, there seems to be a cyberwar - or at least a cyberskirmish - going on right now and it resembles nothing so much as an extended streetfight. In the red corner, anonymous ‘patriots’, opposed to the dissemination of leaked government information by the Australian whistleblower, seducteur extraordinaire and current guest of Her Majesty, Julian Assange; in the blue corner, an equally anonymous group fighting under the banner of “transparency right or wrong”. Battlegrounds - or collateral damage - include the Wikileaks website and hosting or DNS services that supported it, Paypal, Mastercard, a Swedish law firm, and a Swiss bank. The weapons used include various forms of homebrew DDoS tools, including 4chan’s infamous ‘low orbit ion cannon’ (LOIC), the switchblade of choice for street punks fighting for control of the Intertubes.

Pandalabs has a more detailed description of the current wave of DDoS attacks. Reading it, it’s hard not to think of Matthew Arnold’s line about “where ignorant armies clash by night” … actually, no, it’s very easy not to think of that. I just threw it in because it sounded cool. Seriously, though, it starts to look as if a better model for cyberwar might be the drug-gang wars in Mexico. There too we have ‘non-state actors’ whose identities and objectives are more or less mysterious (and some of whom may be deniable proxies for the state). We have the state intervening as just another combatant, and not necessarily a successful one. And we have a kind of take-no-prisoners ferociousness that threatens to spill over and make life unlivable for everyone. 

Looking further back, it’s possible to see analogies in medieval times, where each walled village was pretty much responsible for its own defense. If your website arouses the ire of some angry gang of zealots or the cupidity of professional extortionists, the state isn’t going to leap to your defense. The feudal lord to whom you pay shield money - known these days as an internet service provider - might send troops, but if the action gets too hot and threatens to embroil him in a battle he can’t win, he’ll probably cut you loose.

All this doesn’t offer much scope for steely-haired Air Force generals. They don’t have the interest or the resources to fight in a dozen brushfire wars raging simultaneously. Whatever big guns the state is able to dream up are likely to sit idle most of the time for lack of suitable targets. Cyberwar is asymmetric warfare par excellence: having the most resources or a professional standing army doesn’t guarantee you victory when you have so many weak spots that are vulnerable to hit-and-run attacks by scrappy bands of irregulars. 

The Chinese electronic invasion may come one day or it may not. In the meantime, the cyberwars have already started and they aren’t playing out quite the way the media said they would.