Cyber Defence – warfare of the future?

With the heavy reliance of military, banks and even civilians on the Internet today, it’s no surprise that criminal and terrorist activities are focusing their efforts on reeking havoc on the web these days. While it used to be individual hackers who stole credit cards and brought down webpages such as the New York Times’ site in 1998 and the White House’s page in 2001 (allegedly by Chinese hackers), now the latest attacks are much more coordinated and can be directed to attack the critical infrastructure of an entire country, as the recent cyber-attack on Estonia in 2007 showed. The sophisticated attackers used a distributed denial-of-service technique, in which “hackers infiltrated computers around the world with software known as bots, and banded them together in networks to perform these incursions. The computers become unwitting foot soldiers, or “zombies,” in a cyber attack” (New York Times)

As a result of the attack in Estonia, nearly all government ministry networks and two Estonian banks were knocked offline. Many say this was the first example of a cyber-war we have seen. The fact that the Internet often forms the critical backbone of a country’s infrastructure is also illustrated by the rumors currently circulating Cairo’s streets. After the recent destruction of an underwater telecommunication cable by a ship in the Mediterranean Sea that disrupted Cairo’s Internet access, the initial rumors interpreted this to be the first step of the USA for an attack of Iran, according to our Egypt Correspondent (M.S.).

So where is our Cyber Defence?

In 2003, the US government created the National Infrastructure Advisory Council that operates within DHS to produce the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, which among many other points stresses the importance of: “performing and funding research and development along with other agencies that will lead to new scientific understanding and technologies in support of homeland security.“

Following this report’s point about looking at the private sector for solutions, we can confirm the validity of working with scientists and entrepreneurs to tackle problems like this. One prime example is Iviz, an Indian startup company that has developed an artificial intelligence technology to simulate intelligent human hackers. They were selected amongst the top-6 security startups in the world by the Global Security Challenge 2007.