Information and Cyber Warfare

1. Information and Cyber Warfare Lesson 5

2. Motivating Factors in Hacking – 4 Domains outlined by Dr. Denning • Play: hacking/cracking, phreaking • crime: illegal acts including intellectual property crime and computer fraud and abuse • individual rights: conflicts over free speech and privacy • national security: foreign intelligence operations, war and military conflicts, terrorism, and operations against a nation by nonstate players

3. Motivation -- Play

4. Motivation -- Play • From an Interview of a “cracker” by Dr. Dorothy Denning: • Hacking was the ultimate cerebral buzz for me. I would come home from another dull day at school, turn my computer on, and become a member of the hacker elite. It was a whole different world where there were no condescending adults and you were judged by your talent. I would first check in to the private bulletin boards where other people who were like me would hang out, see what the new was in the community, and trade some info with people across the country. Then I would start actually hacking. My brain would be going a million miles an hour and I’d basically completely forget about my body as I would jump from one computer to another trying to find a path into my target. It was the rush of working on a puzzle coupled with the high discovery many magnitudes intensified. To go along with the adrenaline rush was the illicit thrill of doing something illegal. Every step I made could be the one that would bring the authorities crashing down on me. I was on the edge of technology and exploring past it, spelunking into electronic caves where I wasn’t supposed to be.

5. Motivation -- Play • Bored at school • member of an elite group • thrill (adrenaline rush) • curiosity • power + sense of control

6. Motivation -- Crime • Intellectual Property (figures from Denning’s 1999 book) • Piracy (losses exceed $20B, mostly external to US) • Theft of trade secrets ($40-$250B) • Biggest risk is insider • Fraud • telemarketing scams ($40B) • identity theft and bank fraud (#’s fuzzy but includes credit card theft) • telecommunications ($5-$10B) • Computer Fraud & Abuse • Organized Crime

7. Motivation -- Individual Rights • Rights to Privacy & Free speech • Where do these rights come from? • Are they universal? • Privacy, who “owns” the info about you? • Check a company’s privacy statement • Conflicts between free speech and harmful or disturbing speech • flaming -vs- defamation • Conflicts over censorship • some countries restrict satellite and Internet access for national interests or religious reasons • some restrict to protect groups such as children

8. Governments at War • The U.S. has been the target of widespread technological and industrial espionage – from our allies. • In 1997, the American Society for Industrial Security identified several nations that routinely conduct industrial espionage against the U.S. • France • Germany • Israel • China • South Korea • Four of these are considered Allies.

9. First real IW attack within 20 yrs • From a 1996 GAO report to the DoD • “Defense officials and information systems security experts believe that over 120 foreign countries are developing information warfare techniques. The techniques enable our enemies to seize control of or harm sensitive Defense information systems or public networks, which Defense relies upon for communications. Terrorists or other adversaries now have the United States to launch untraceable attacks from anywhere in the world.”

10. Information Warfare • Information Warfare is about money. It’s about the acquisition of wealth and the denial of wealth to competitors. • Information Warfare is about power. He who controls the information controls the money. • Information Warfare is about fear. He who controls the information can instill fear in those who want to keep their secrets a secret. • Information Warfare is about politics. • Information Warfare is about survival. • Excerpts from Information Warfare by Winn Schwartau

11. Information Warfare • “There’s a war out there, and it’s about who controls the information. It’s all about the information.” • COSMO in “Sneakers” • “Information is the currency of victory on the battlefield.” • GEN Gordon Sullivan, CSA (1993)

12. Schwartau’s 3 classes of IW • Class 1: Personal Information Warfare • Class 2: Corporate Information Warfare • Class 3: Global Information Warfare

13. Information Warfare “weapons” • Computer Viruses • Worms • Trojan Horses • Logic Bombs • Trap Doors • Van Eck devices • Chipping • Nano machines and Microbes • Electronic Jamming • HERF Guns - EMP Bombs • Penetration exploits and tools

14. Other Hackers Tool Developers Geniuses Tool development From Corporate Espionage by Ira Winkler Tools and Knowledge Foreign Intelligence Agencies Criminals Information about Targets

15. What is an act of war? • Article 51 of the UN Charter • Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations • Article 41 • The Security Council may decide what measures not involving the use of armed force are to be employed to give effect to its decisions, and it may call upon the Members of the United Nations to apply such measures. These may include complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal,telegraphic, radio, and other means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations.

16. What is a valid target? WASHINGTON, May 23 (Reuters) - U.S. President Bill Clinton has approved a top-secret plan to destabilize Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, using computer hackers to attack his foreign bank accounts and a sabotage campaign to erode his public support, Newsweek magazine reported on Sunday. The magazine, in its May 23 edition, quoted sources as saying Clinton issued an intelligence "finding" allowing the Central Intelligence Agency to find "ways to get at Milosevic." The finding would permit the CIA to train ethnic Albanian rebels in Kosovo in the art of sabotage, including such tricks as cutting telephone lines, fouling gasoline reserves and pilfering food supplies, the magazine said. The CIA also was instructed to wage a cyberwar against Milosevic, using computer hackers to tap into the Yugoslav president's foreign bank accounts, the magazine said.

17. Information Warfare • Definition of Information Warfare: • 'Actions taken to achieve information superiority by affecting an adversary information, information-based processes, information systems, and computer-based networks while defending one's own information, information-based processes, information systems, and computer-based networks.' • Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction No. 3210.01

18. IW from “Cornerstones”

20. Information Operations • For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the pinnacle of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the pinnacle of skill. -- Sun Tzu. • True hackers don't give up. They explore every possible way into a network, not just the well known ones. -- The hacker Jericho. • The most likely perpetrators of cyber attacks on critical infrastructures are terrorists and criminal groups rather than nation-states. -- The Gilmore Commission • Cyberspace is the battlefield of tomorrow…Instead of confronting us head-to-head on the traditional battlefield, adversaries will confront the U.S. at its point of least resistance-- our information infrastructure. -- Sen. Fred Thompson, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, June 1998 • By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. -- Benjamin Franklin

21. What are the types/forms of IO?Martin Libicki, NDU, August 1995,What is Information Warfare? • Command-and-Control Warfare • C2W [Command-and control-warfare] is the military strategy that implements Information Warfare (DoD Directive TS- 3600.1, 21 December 1992, "Information Warfare") on the battlefield and integrates physical destruction. Its objective is to decapitate the enemy's command structure from its body of command forces. • Intelligence-Based Warfare • IBW occurs when intelligence is fed directly into operations (notably, targeting and battle damage assessment), rather than used as an input for overall command and control. IBW results directly in the application of steel to target (rather than corrupted bytes).

22. IO (cont) • Electronic Warfare • The first two forms of IW discussed deal with attacks either on systems (C2 warfare) or by systems (IBW). The third form is EW, or operational techniques: radioelectronic and cryptographic, thus war in the realm of communications. EW attempts to degrade the physical basis for transferring information, while cryptographic warfare works between bits and bytes. • Psychological Warfare • Psychological warfare, as used here, encompasses the use of information against the human mind (rather than against computer support). There are four categories of psychological warfare: (i) operations against the national will, (ii) operations against opposing commanders, (iii) operations against troops, and -- a category much respected abroad -- (iv) cultural conflict.

23. IO (cont) • Hacker Warfare • Winn Schwartau, among others, uses the term information warfare to refer almost exclusively to attacks on computer networks. In contrast to physical combat, these attacks are specific to properties of the particular system because the attacks exploit known holes in the system's security structure. In that sense the system is complicit in its own degradation. • Hacker warfare varies considerably. Attackers can be on site, although the popular imagination can place them anywhere. The intent of an attack can range from total paralysis to intermittent shutdown, random data errors, wholesale theft of information, theft of services (e.g., unpaid-for telephone calls), illicit systems' monitoring (and intelligence collection), the injection of false message traffic, and access to data for the purpose of blackmail. Among the popular devices are viruses, logic bombs, Trojan horses, and sniffers.

24. IO (cont) • Economic Information Warfare • The marriage of information warfare and economic warfare can take two forms: information blockade and information imperialism. • The effectiveness of an information blockade presumes an era in which the well-being of societies will be as affected by information flows as they are today by flows of material supplies. Nations would strangle others' access to external data. • To believe in information imperialism means believing in modern day economic imperialism. Thus, trade is war. Nations struggle with one another to dominate strategic economic industries. Nations specialize in certain industries. The good industries command high wages and, usually, feature high growth rates. They tend to be knowledge- intensive. The constant exchange of information, in particular, early access to interesting technical questions and information resources, provides one an edge in coming up with interesting solutions. • (Libicki doesn’t directly address it but what about corporate information espionage?)

25. IO (cont) • Cyber Warfare • Includes information terrorism, semantic attacks, simula-warfare and Gibson-warfare. • Although terrorism is often understood as the application of random violence against apparently arbitrary targets, when terrorism works it does so because it is directed against very specific targets, often by name. Thus, Information terrorism would target information about a specific individual to affect their actions. • A system under semantic attack operates and will be perceived as operating correctly (otherwise the semantic attack is a failure), but it will generate answers at variance with reality. • Could fighting a simulated war prove to the enemy that it will lose? • Gibson-warfare from William Gibson's Neuromancer. Think conflict on the Internet, maybe at first only in the guise of virtual stalkers, sexual harassers, or flame wars. Now consider technologies capability to, in effect, launch a simulacrum into the net, armed with its master's wants and needs, to make reservations, acquire goods, hand over assets, and, with work, to negotiate terms for enforceable contracts. Now take the next step and allow an individual’s online agents to conduct their own info battle. -- TRON.

26. Information Warfare • Michael Brown in “The Revolution in Military Affairs: The Information Dimension” described several aspects of IW. • May be aimed at the Nation or the military • Has three distinct phases • Peace • Crisis • War • Identified three types • Type I: Perception Management • Type II: Denial, Destruction, degradation, distortion • Type III: Exploiting enemy information flows

27. Recent IW • 2007 Estonia: Russian “patriots” wage campaign • 2009 DOS on Georgia: In July 2009, it appeared to the Georgian government that it was being attacked by a presumed ally — the U.S., or at least from a civilian computer in U.S. territory. In August, cybersecurity experts observed a second, much larger wave of DDoS attacks against Georgian government Web sites. In response, the Georgian government took an unorthodox step and sought cyberrefuge in the U.S., Poland and Estonia. Within the U.S., Georgia located its cybercapabilities on servers at Tulip Systems (TSHost) in Atlanta, Ga., and at Google in California. When Estonia experienced a cyberattack in 2007, it essentially defended in place; Georgia, on the other hand, maneuvered. It elegantly relocated strategic IP-based cybercapabilities to other defensive points on the Internet, thereby ensuring continued war-time communications with Georgian citizens and forces. By doing so, the Georgian government partially defeated the botnet cyberattack by flowing a portion of its strategic C2 through the U.S. and other allies. Ref: http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2009/01/3801084

28. Protecting the National Infrastructures • What are they? • Systems so critical to the United States that their loss or damage would have serious impact on the functioning and operation of the nation.

29. Critical Infrastructures (original) Information & Communication Electrical Power Systems Gas & Oil Production, Storage & Transportation Banking & Finance Transportation Water Supply Systems Emergency Services Government Services

30. Protecting the National Infrastructures • What are they? • Who might attack? • Criminals (drug cartels) • terrorists • crackers • governments

31. PSYOPS andPerception Management • Perception Management: • information operations that aim to affect the perceptions of others in order to influence their emotions, reasoning, decisions, and ultimately actions. • PSYOPS (psychological operations) • aim to influence behavior by affecting the human psyche through fear, desire, logic, and other mental factors.

32. Perception Management • Any medium can be exploited • face-to-face communications, print, telecommunications, broadcast, and computer networks. • PM often taken to mean media manipulation (for good or bad). • NOT just a military function, also seen in • Politics • Advertising • everyday relationships

33. SOFTWAR (Chuck de Caro) • “The hostile use of global television to shape another nation’s will by changing its vision of reality.” • Global television offers parties a “cheap, accurate, real-time, politico-military intelligence service that simultaneously acts as an extremely potent instrument to affect adversely and directly the US domestic body politic.”

34. Softwar (example) • Haiti • “A … Haitian dictator, using global TV as the ‘Poor Man’s I&W’ … judged the likely US reaction in the wake of revulsion at the video-tape of Rangers being killed and mutilated in Somalia. He optimized his political-military moves to forestall US intervention by having a handful of rabble assemble on a pier, mug angrily-on-cue for global TV while waving English-language placards. He thus turned away a US warship -- on a UN mission -- with nothing more than the video of an alleged mob that generated the perception of imminent bloodshed projected and amplified by TV. The perception was worsened by video coverage of the warship sailing away.” -- Chuck de Caro “Softwar” • Somalia

35. Softwar (example) • L.A. rioting - skipping ignition pulse • “In 1965, the Watts area of Los Angeles was a tinder-box, with an ‘ignition temperature’ set by local conditions of poverty, crime, racism and escalating tensions between the populace and the police. All that was needed was a localized ignition pulse; a spark that ironically came when the police arrested an intoxicated black motorist. Once ignited, the riot spread in the classic manner, outward from the center by word-of-mouth to the edges of Watts. By contrast, the 1992 Los Angeles upheaval, broadcast as-it-happened on global real-time TV sent an ignition pulse that set off simultaneous fires wherever the same ignition conditions existed, without a localized spark. The result was a ‘hopping phenomenon,’ generating riots in San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta and then even to Toronto, Canada.” -- Chuck de Caro, “Softwar”

36. The nature of TV • “Television, by its nature, is an effective, insidious and dangerous medium for delivery of propaganda… television is a ‘cool’ medium that defines events by the viewer’s perception of images and sound, rather than of reality. “ • “Perception can be further distorted by various aspects of telegenics: lighting, sun angle, ‘star’ quality, voice quality, …” • An example • “The Nixon-Kennedy debate during the 1960 Presidential election is one example. The transcripts show a fairly even contest; those listening on radio felt strongly that Nixon had won. To the millions watching television, however, Kennedy’s natural camera appeal was enhanced by makeup and a dark suit and contrasted with a perspiring Nixon with a five-o’clock shadow, leaving the perception that Kennedy had won decisively.”

37. What can we trust on TV? • 1st down line in football coverage • Forrest Gump • Wag the Dog

38. What’s in a name? • Pro-choice -vs- Pro-life • Florida Election • Fair -vs- Timely (or legal)

39. The incubator story • During the invasion, Iraqi soldiers entered multiple Kuwaiti hospitals, removed babies from incubators, shipped the incubators back to Iraq, and left the babies on the floor. • Story repeated often, several witnesses came forward.

40. The incubator story The players • Nayirah • President Bush • Congressmen • Citizens for a Free Kuwait • Congressional Human Rights Caucus • Hill & Knowlton

41. The Testimony • Nayirah's full name was being kept confidential to prevent Iraqi reprisals against her family in occupied Kuwait. Sobbing, she described what she had seen with her own eyes in a hospital in Kuwait City. Her written testimony was passed out in a media kit prepared by Citizens for a Free Kuwait. • "I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital," Nayirah said. "While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where . . . babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.” • -- John R. MacArthur, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War

42. Lying to Congress? • "The Human Rights Caucus is not a committee of congress, and therefore it is unencumbered by the legal accouterments that would make a witness hesitate before he or she lied . . . Lying under oath in front of a congressional committee is a crime; lying from under the cover of anonymity to a caucus is merely public relations. • -- John R. MacArthur, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War

43. The story continues • Hill & Knowlton had the baby incubator story repeated before the United Nations Security Council chamber in an audiovisual presentation on November 27. • The presentation was loaded with anonymous charges of Iraqi brutality and the reiteration of the baby incubator story. A Kuwaiti dentist, claiming to be a surgeon and using a false name, testified that under his supervision 120 newborn babies were buried in the second week of the invasion.

44. President Bush • the baby incubator story was repeated six times by George Bush in various political speeches, including a speech to the troops near Dhahran: • "It turns your stomach when you listen to the tales of those that have escaped the brutality of Saddam the invader. Mass hangings. Babies pulled from incubators and scattered like firewood across the floor."

45. Was it True? • January 17, 1991 article by Alexander Cockburn in the Los Angeles Times openly challenged the incubator myth. • According to London Amnesty International spokesman Sean Styles, "we spoke to well over a dozen doctors of different nationalities who had been in Kuwait at the time and they couldn't stand the story up, and it became quite clear to us that credible medical opinion was that this didn't happen." • Amnesty International backed down from their original story in the seventh paragraph of a press release, stating that they had found • "no reliable evidence that Iraqi forces had caused the deaths of babies by removing them or ordering their removal from incubators."

46. Was it True? • After the war, Middle East Watch was shown death certificates for 30 Kuwaiti babies who were all buried on August 24, 1990. Of those 30 babies, 19 had died before the Iraqi invasion began, and 11 died during the occupation. None of the 30 were ever shown to have been removed from incubators. All of the witnesses backed off from their original claims of having supervised or participated in the burial of babies. • Andrew Whitley, executive director of Middle East Watch, and part of a two-man investigation in Kuwait, was quoted as having said: • "Soon after we arrived in Kuwait, two weeks after the liberation it became apparent that the story was a complete hoax. We were able to go 'round the hospitals to count the incubators and find that - possibly with one or two that had been misplaced - that none were missing. So none of the incubators were removed in the first place. Moreover, it seemed quite clear that there weren't any deaths which had been deliberately the cause of the Iraqis having gone in and stolen equipment."

47. What was the effect? • The final decision to go to war was made on January 12, 1991 in a Senate vote of 52 to 47 (a margin of 3). Before passing this resolution, six pro-war senators specifically brought forth the baby incubator allegations in their speeches supporting the resolution. • OPERATION DESERT STORM:OUTRIGHT DISINFORMATION SCHEME by David Fingrut • Without this story, would there have been a war?

48. Hill & Knowlton • 100+ individuals worked on the campaign • $11M in fees • They present themselves as an international PR firm • Interesting background considering their Integrity statement

49. Hill & Knowlton

50. Washington State suit against tobacco industry • The defendants are American Tobacco; Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., Lorillard Tobacco Co., Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., United State Tobacco Co., B.A.T. Industries P.L.C. and related organizations, including Hill & Knowlton, The Council for Tobacco Research-USA Inc., Smokeless Tobacco Council and the Tobacco Institute.