Cyber in context

We know that the Internet and social media can be used to support war efforts. But what about the invisible subterfuge that goes on behind the scenes? Joining us to help unpack this aspect of cyber warfare is Cyber Security Expert from the SANS institute, James Lyne.

Chris - James, what do we mean by cyber a warfare or is this very much a moving target?

James - It is a bit of a moving target and quite a broad term. We are all using technology around us all the time; in our homes, in our hospitals, in our cities, at every moment in our lives as we interact with the world. Unfortunately, building technology without flaws is impossible, so security researchers or cyber criminals or governments can find these flaws and where the former will use that to help businesses become more secure, the latter could use it to gain access to systems, maybe remote controlling them, distributing nasty malicious code that steals usernames, passwords, or maybe even wipes or manipulates data. It can also involve manipulation of sentiment on social media. We've just heard from Solomiya about some very wise practices about caution of disinformation online, checking the validity of news sources, and care in sharing intelligence. Most of the time, cyber criminals take actions focused on making money, stealing data for extortion and so on, while cyber warfare is the idea these techniques can be used as a part of a nation state or integrated military campaign. Cyber war, which is a more serious, but very similar term, is actually a bit of a sticky subject for us experts because war has a very specific definition, a requirement for scale of life and impact.

Chris - It's interesting you bring that up though, James, because one of the criticisms being levelled at Vladimir Putin's attacks is that he keeps on bringing down civilians and civilian targets in the crossfire. What sorts of targets would people tend to go for in the cyber space, or actually are civilian targets the very targets that you want to target in cyber warfare?

James - I think we all, when we hear about the notion of cyber war and cyber warfare in the media, tend towards the idea of targeting missile silos and power stations, which has actually happened. But, a lot of the time it's targeting information sources, it's targeting civilians, it's targeting social media. A lot of the time, it's trying to draw attention away from true motives. And indeed, that's a lot of what seems to be happening in Ukraine at the moment. The UK National Cybersecurity Centre, the Department of Homeland Security warned of potential substantial Russian cyber attacks like have happened before, more on the serious infrastructure side, but to date, they've not really been that advanced; not having a kinetic impact. They've mostly been distributed denial of service, which is knocking a site or service online - a bit like getting 20 of your friends together and going to a supermarket and filling up the rotating doors so no one can get in. Russia, by the way, has form for these tactics. They were used against Estonia back in 2007.

Chris - Is it just that governments of all colours and flavours have got an army of people sitting in rooms at computers, basically just knocking on doors of computers wherever they can all over the world to just try and force entry somewhere and find vulnerabilities? Is that what's happening? You've just got people who are relentlessly ploughing around the world, looking for things that they can hack into.

James - Well, in effect, yes. Espionage has been something countries the world over have engaged in forever. Cyber provides an asymmetric opportunity to get information intelligence or cause disruption. So, of course, everyone is escalating their efforts into this domain. What's interesting, having just said that, so far, most of the examples from Russia have been very basic, there are a couple of attacks they've purportedly executed - it is rather difficult sometimes to attribute these attacks, particularly because nation states will often contract with cyber criminals for plausible deniability, kind of like a cyber reserve with less ethics - they've been known to target power stations. Indeed, back in 2015, causing a blackout, that plunged a couple hundred thousand Ukrainians into darkness for a few hours.