We are currently standing on the brink of what could be a major offensive between the western world and North Korea, but even if it swings into a full operation we may not see the blows dealt, but we will definitely feel the aftermath.
The Cyberwar started when the servers from Sony Pictures were hacked by a group calling themselves The Guardians of Peace. The initial action saw them take gigabytes, possibly terabytes, of data and threatening to release it if Sony didn’t meet their demands.
Initially we didn’t know what these demands were, except that they seemed to involve something to do with equality and how Sony were treating their employees. The phrasing of the threats seemed to suggest this was partially an inside job and we quickly discovered that Sony’s defences, both physical and virtual, were hugely flawed which allowed the attack to take place.
It appeared to be nothing more than a group of online activists taking on a large corporation that it saw as being unfair to the people that worked for it, possibly mixed with some bad feeling from ex-employees.
A few days after the event the first data was released, it was an exceptionally embarrassing series of emails that caught Sony criticising some of it’s main stars and bewailing production issues for some of it’s films. This was quickly followed up by the release of some private data, such as social security information, pay scales and phone numbers.
At no point was any mention of The Interview or North Korea made, until the newspapers started reporting that this was in response to Sony’s decision to release the film and North Korea were retaliating. After this the Guardians of Peace started referencing this as their main reason for the attacks, but all the messages seem to be more of a response to the newspapers claims rather than an actual agenda.
This didn’t stop the FBI from officially blaming North Korea with some especially ropey ‘proof’, the main proof that was especially damning was kept secret though – so we’ll never know what the incredibly damning evidence was.
I don’t want to mention Weapons of Mass Destruction, but well – I just did …
Regardless of the shaky reasons for blaming NK the US have promised to respond to this attack and, sure enough, late yesterday North Koreas connection to the internet was effectively disabled.
This is a fairly complicated picture to see, the vast majority of North Koreas populace can only access the their internal internet like network. This network provides state sponsored information and news. A select few inner party members are able to connect to the full worldwide internet. As far as we can make out all of the connections were taken out, both internal and external.
As of this morning the internal network seems to be working again and the populace are once more receiving the state sponsored information services.
Given as it was hard on the heels of the US announcement it seems likely that this was the first volley from the american intelligence operatives. Whilst taking out North Koreas external internet would have been, relatively, easy taking down the internal network would have been a sophisticated operation.
On the face of it you could argue that this was a reasonable response to a perceived attack on a US business concern. Except without absolute proof we can never be sure this was a strike by North Korea. And without being able to absolutely prove that this was North Korea any strike the western world makes is an unprovoked attack on a, nominally, weaker nation.
Possibly there are many who feel this is fine, especially given that we don’t truly fear North Korea. Indeed we find them almost comical in their posturing. I doubt South Korea would agree, but then they’re in full range of North Koreas entirely effective Nuclear arsenal.
The world we live in today is a complicated one, pretty much every nation has a department dealing with Computer based intelligence. In the west these departments are mostly dealing with the near constant attacks from various nations. These happen pretty much all the time as foreign nations probe the defences. China is an especially effective proponent in this and have, allegedly, managed to strike at many military targets in European, NATO and Americans concerns. Plans for advanced weapons, battle formations and diplomatic papers have all been mentioned as spoils in this war.
Obviously the western groups are also trying to strike against targets (including each other), but you know the simple truth? We aren’t as good. We started late in the Cyber Intelligence stakes and even now with the computers of the outside world constantly battering on our doors we still don’t take it seriously. Our departments are made up of unimaginative, grey operatives and military personnel, trained by so called experts and paid poorly.
Their opponents are well trained, excellently paid and have a high social standing in their countries. Hackers are recruited from a young age from groups showing strong ability. The culture of obedience and national pride means these young hackers are happy to provide a service for their state.
In contrast our best hackers are unlikely to want to cooperate with a government that has shown zero tolerance for even the slightest cyber misdemeanour. The culture they have grown up in is one of distrust and rebellion. So we have a group of dour unimaginative operatives doing a job fighting an army of bright, young and enthusiastic cyber warriors.
We can’t win, there isn’t a square on the cyber battlefield that is even our ground. We haven’t made the rules and we will lose every time. Maybe we can hold our own for a while, but as the war escalates we’ll eventually be unable to fight back and it will be ruinous for us, the loss of our online infrastructure at a time when we are barely pulling ourselves out of a financial mire would be devastating.
At times like this the only way to win is to not play, and that’s our only route. We should pull back and put the effort into strengthening our defences. It’s unlikely that the Americans would ever heed that advice, they sense the blood in the water – unfortunately it’s their blood, not North Koreas.