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Also, it has been suggested that it was the United States that triggered the failure of the first test of India’s Brahmos-II missile on Jan. 20, 2009 by shutting down the global positioning system feed to the missile for a critical 90 seconds. When the missile’s advanced seeker failed to access the GPS data it went out of control. A few weeks later the same test was a great success.
On July 4 it was reported that North Korea had mounted a cyber attack on U.S. websites, including that of the White House.
Welcome to the information warfare of the 21st century. Without firing a shot or physically crossing international boundaries, an advanced nation can cripple the military, economic and financial structure of other nations.
In the last 20 years, there has been excessive reliance on electronic surveillance, electronic countermeasures, and GPS sending and receiving electronic feeds to planes and missiles. Very soon gun bullets and artillery shells will have target seekers fed by GPS systems.
In nineteenth century warfare communications were maintained by riders on horseback and smoke signals. World War I had wired communication devices, but enemies also tapped into the messages being relayed, hence the encryption of messages began. World War II had wireless systems, which again the enemy could listen into.
From 1945 to 2000, military communications progressively brought the use of high-powered microwaves. As satellite technology made its debut 40 years ago, reliance on GPS systems was introduced. Both friends and enemies could use this, but the owners of the GPS can temporarily shut down the system or confuse the signal. The United States, which owns these systems, has all the cards in its hands.
China has been using the Internet and GPS to its advantage, becoming progressively more sophisticated at Internet spying and defacing unfriendly websites. When web networks were in their infancy in the 1990s, such attacks were considered harmless. But as the Chinese learned better techniques and networks got more sophisticated they turned to spying. Such activity is hard to pinpoint and it is still harder to catch the perpetrator.
In 2006 China demonstrated its first military-grade cyber attack capability when it accessed Taiwan’s Ministry of Defense network. Since then hundreds of such attacks have been noted in the United States and India, especially on militarily sensitive organizations. China’s information warfare has dual purposes – spying and disruption.
Efforts have been made to access the U.S. Pentagon’s military network. The United States was aware of this, but allowed the hackers to proceed in order to nail them down. What the Chinese did not know was that the United States was not only tracking them, but also mounted a reverse attack to burn the data files which had been copied. The Chinese, as always, have denied this.
India has been a key target of Chinese attacks. The computers of nine Indian embassies, including those in the United States, Britain and Germany, as well as the National Informatics Center, Indian Foreign Office and Indian Defense Ministry, have been broken into. A Canadian research organization – the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto, uncovered all this espionage work in March, 2009. Of course China dismissed this as propaganda.
For years Tibetan organizations in India and abroad, specifically the Dalai Lama’s computers in India, have been attacked for information. Only when they hired a security expert to study the loopholes in their system did they discover that a number of attacks had occurred in the last few years.
The British newspaper The Guardian reported in November, 2008 that China had emerged as crime central for cyber attacks. The Chinese government has spent a decade developing these techniques, and now wants to disrupt U.S. military deployments around the world. These are the findings of a U.S. Congressional panel. The panel also concluded that the Chinese consider U.S. space assets and computer networks as “soft ribs and strategic weakness,” to be targeted.
Much of the technology the Chinese have developed to disrupt military sites is also applicable to commercial sites. CBS News on April 7 reported on its website that the Pentagon has spent as much as US$100 million in the last six months to repair damage caused by cyber attacks, most of which originated in China.
One of the conclusions reached by private cyber security agencies is that China wishes to achieve a cyber breakthrough to locate U.S. aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines on the high seas. Currently it can get approximate locations by satellites and other means. This vital knowledge would give them an advantage in battle.
Knowing all this, the Obama administration wishes to appoint a national cyber security advisor with a mandate to centralize all cyber security operations and give them a new focus. The position is unfilled, but Republican Congressman Tom Davis has been mentioned. How his work unfolds will set the political tone for future efforts to prevent cyber attacks.
Cyber attacks on India from China are not necessarily routine hacking. They are highly sophisticated attacks with the purpose of gaining complete knowledge of India’s large commercial information technology and business processing outsourcing networks. In the last four years attackers have gained some knowledge of these networks. When push comes to shove they can selectively disable a network and ruin India’s business relationships.
China also hopes to gain complete knowledge of the Indian military’s command, control and communications network. How much penetration the Chinese have achieved is unknown, although the Indian military establishment is fully aware of it. Identifying and eliminating potential threats is a very time-consuming process, yet India has layered its network with triple security. Still “Zombie” threats present inside networks that have already been penetrated are harder to locate.
Proactive cyber defense has become a necessity since the Estonian cyber attack in 2007. This nation’s network was completely compromised for a few days. The Russians were blamed for it. Now seven European nations have got together with the United States as observers to build a cyber defense center in Estonia.
Clever defense is not waiting for a cyber attack to happen but to prevent it at the source. Most nations and their national security teams are pushing a strike back or pre-emptive counterattack strategy. Every nation with this threat looming is establishing a super-secret team of cyber spies and hackers who will go into counterattack mode on the hackers’ network. This is a peacetime activity with no laws broken. Counter-hackers will break the hackers’ network and disable it.
The world is just getting around to dealing with information warfare activities. So far China has spooked computer networks all over the world. They may be testing their ability to mount an attack in future. Help is on the way, however. Spies will have to match counterspies and hackers will have to match counter-hackers. The smarter of the two will carry the day. China should be wary of India’s massive IT capability and its counterstrike capability.
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(Hari Sud is a retired vice president of C-I-L Inc., a former investment strategies analyst and international relations manager. A graduate of Punjab University and the University of Missouri, he has lived in Canada for the past 34 years. ©Copyright Hari Sud.)
