[HN Gopher] Articles on Cyber-Warfare from the Modern War Instit...
___________________________________________________________________
Articles on Cyber-Warfare from the Modern War Institute at West
Point
Author : Ice_cream_suit
Score : 106 points
Date : 2022-01-10 09:15 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (mwi.usma.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (mwi.usma.edu)
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Take a look at the institute's list of fellows - some very
| interesting people!
|
| https://mwi.usma.edu/fellows/max-brooks/
| alex_anglin wrote:
| Getting off topic here a fair bit, but you may enjoy these
| conversations with Max Brooks from the Commonwealth Club:
|
| -How Star Wars Explains Modern Military Conflict:
| https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archive/podcast/max-...
|
| -How Game of Thrones Explains Modern Military Conflict:
| https://mlcavanaugh.com/2019/04/09/how-game-of-thrones-expla...
| ya_throw wrote:
| >"Ignore the Human Factor at your peril"
|
| Indeed. Why bother with weapons (kinetic AND cyber) at all, when
| the both the spread and the pseudo-anonymous nature of online
| communication has left the thoughts, desires and opinions of the
| Western world wide open for study and manipulation.
|
| I used to have strong opinions about the necessity for a fully
| free, open, anonymous, untracked, etc etc, internet. However,
| from a national security point of view, countries like Russia and
| China have it right. Why would you allow the above to happen to
| your citizens?
| juanani wrote:
| champagnois wrote:
| >>Western world wide open for study and manipulation
|
| I have long since held the opinion that blogs and online
| publishing would yield an avenue for foreign influence and
| cognitive attacks on our way of life.
|
| For what it is worth, I do believe that the government and our
| intelligence agencies are fundamentally good and are staffed by
| mostly non-partisan, non-extremist patriots who I have
| tremendous respect for. We are, presently, a government for the
| people by the people and of the people.
|
| I do, however, fear that our intelligence agencies and
| politicians exist with a high degree of arrogance derived from
| a faith in the superiority of our messaging. I share their
| faith that our way of life and methods of dealing with each
| other is superior to that of communist or authoritarian
| societies, but I do not share their same level of arrogance.
|
| I am more inclined to think that the internet should be
| modified so as to ensure that the emergent dialogue, the
| emergent narrative of history and events, is one that came
| about naturally from our citizens speaking with one another.
|
| For starters, comment sections should be siloed or firewalled
| nationally. Media entities of significance that wish to portray
| themselves as reputable news media should be required to have a
| registration with the government. Their comment sections should
| be limited to an anonymized walled-garden of citizens of our
| country only.
|
| Removing foreign influence operatives from the comment sections
| of CNN, WashingtonPost, and Fox News would do a lot to heal the
| national divide and quell the brewing extremism.
|
| I would go much further than that and would do tons of
| experiments if I was in charge of a department handling such a
| push at the government level. I think all of these troll
| attacks on our republic fall under the umbrella term "cognitive
| attacks" and I think it is time we make an effort to apply
| network security concepts to our national, internal dialogue.
| webdoodle wrote:
| > Removing foreign influence operatives from the comment
| sections of CNN, WashingtonPost, and Fox News would do a lot
| to heal the national divide and quell the brewing extremism.
|
| No one in Operation Mockingbird even so much as got a sternly
| written letter when they were caught implanting CIA agents
| within national news agencies. They got the message loud and
| clear though, it was only a problem if the U.S. government
| directly coordinated the propaganda directly. The CIA
| immediately privatized the whole operation and hid it behind
| the curtain in Allen and Co's Sun Valley conference, where
| they still meet every year (for 37 years now), to coordinate
| the national narrative.
| champagnois wrote:
| The government of the people, by the people, for the people
| is able to talk to the press and control the media through
| various means. This is true. This is also fundamentally
| good when the government is a Western Liberal Democracy.
|
| The issue I am trying to discuss is the comment sections
| which are being leveraged as an attack vector. In addition
| to that, there is the issue of attackers leveraging
| abstracted comment sections like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook,
| and even HackerNews.
|
| The adversaries are everywhere. They are even embedded in
| tech companies under false identities.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _They are even embedded in tech companies under false
| identities._ "
|
| "The commies are among us!" seems to historically have
| done more damage to us than it did to them.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Removing foreign influence operatives from the comment
| sections of CNN, WashingtonPost, and Fox News
|
| Even if it didn't fail the first amendment test, and the
| difficulty of identifying the real identity and nationality
| of posters, this would be easily addressed by paying some
| Americans to be propagandists. Or just signing up to existing
| domestic propaganda organisations and "steering" them a bit.
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/26/maria-
| butina...
| champagnois wrote:
| It is unclear what you are saying here.
|
| Are you saying (1) "This update to the system's defenses
| would be circumvented by attackers using this alternative
| method."?
|
| or are you saying, (2) "An easier solution is for the
| department of defense to inject their own commenters into
| the comment sections so that truth combats the noise our
| adversaries bombard us with."?
|
| Replying to (1):
|
| This suggestion of yours would involve foreign adversaries
| having to recruit Americans to be traitors in a way that is
| (A) easily tracked to their personal identity and (B) risks
| imprisonment.
|
| It is true that they could try this method, but I doubt
| their success. Few people would betray their nation and
| community in such a transparent way.
|
| That severely handicaps the efforts of our adversaries who
| are currently waging a war for the minds of some of our
| most vulnerable and unstable citizens.
|
| Replying to (2): The DOD already does this. I know of
| several such operations of pretty cool levels of
| sophistication. I think the efforts are made with good
| intentions, but I think this whole effort falls short and
| doesnt stop the problem at the source. It also makes it so
| that comment sections everywhere appear "crazy" and enemy
| efforts still succeed from time to time at programming our
| citizens against the state.
|
| A useful idiot (Russian term) programmed by an adversary to
| doubt the truth will often times see the government's
| sincere efforts to spread the truth as evidence that the
| government is corrupt. These idiots will seek refuge in
| news media ran by adversaries like RT dot com.
|
| A useful idiot will also find themselves accused of being a
| foreign shill. By being accused of working for a foreign
| government while knowing they are just a normal citizen,
| these useful idiots immediately begin to believe that there
| are no foreign shills and that they are, in fact, all
| Americans who are being oppressed by a corrupt government.
| It is this state of "foreign programmed useful-idiocy" that
| renders an idiot to become a pawn to our adversaries who
| will then go around spreading anti-western civilization
| misinformation.
|
| We should just prevent all of this outright, I think #2 is
| simply not enough.
| mcguire wrote:
| I'm having a very hard time with your suggestions. You
| begin with,
|
| " _For starters, comment sections should be siloed or
| firewalled nationally. Media entities of significance
| that wish to portray themselves as reputable news media
| should be required to have a registration with the
| government. Their comment sections should be limited to
| an anonymized walled-garden of citizens of our country
| only._ "
|
| Which limits the visibility of comments to those who are
| identifiably citizens. (How often have you seen a comment
| like, "Things are actually much (better|worse) than what
| is being reported" on an international story?) Then,
|
| " _This suggestion of yours would involve foreign
| adversaries having to recruit Americans to be traitors in
| a way that is (A) easily tracked to their personal
| identity and (B) risks imprisonment. It is true that they
| could try this method, but I doubt their success. Few
| people would betray their nation and community in such a
| transparent way._ "
|
| You declare anyone who violates that barrier to be a
| traitor subject to imprisonment.
|
| That seems to me to be, at best, using a sledgehammer as
| a fly-swatter: it'll do a lot of damage and really won't
| hurt the fly.
|
| And I say that as someone who is not all that fond of
| internet anonymity.
| newbamboo wrote:
| Anonymous and untracked aren't the problem. Facebook is where
| most of "thought, desire and opinion" manipulation occurs.
| Totally the opposite of anonymous and untracked. How about
| Twitter? After these we have our own mainstream media spreading
| misinformation and running d&c psyops on the citizens. And we
| also can put a lot of blame on our vaunted universities. How
| many communist revolutionaries have been produced by radical
| tenured professors. I'd say most.
|
| But you want to blame anonymous and free speech? Rather fascist
| no? Should we do it like the CCP?
| ya_throw wrote:
| I said "pseudo-anonymous", and by that I meant, there's no
| way to know which disparate online identities relate to which
| humans. As a consequence, I personally don't assume that
| anyone online particularly relates to a human.
|
| I would go so far as to now say that, on the largest social
| scales, anonymous and pseudo-anonymous online communication
| is causing the biggest problems. This includes scenarios like
| Facebook friends who you think are people you know and
| website comment sections with plausible-looking people.
| fsociety wrote:
| > Facebook is where most of "thought, desire and opinion"
| manipulation occurs. Totally the opposite of anonymous and
| untracked.
|
| This matches media sentiment instead of what is happening in
| the real world. Qanon originated on 4chan and thrived on
| 8chan.
|
| > After these we have our own mainstream media spreading
| misinformation and running d&c psyops on the citizens.
|
| Tons of misinformation originated from /pol/.
|
| > And we also can put a lot of blame on our vaunted
| universities. How many communist revolutionaries have been
| produced by radical tenured professors.
|
| Free thought is valuable. I do not personally agree with
| communism for a wealth of reasons, but people should be free
| to entertain these ideas and try to understand them.
|
| > But you want to blame anonymous and free speech? Rather
| fascist no? Should we do it like the CCP?
|
| Free speech does not require anonymity. Speaking about the
| cons of a fully anonymous internet does not make someone
| fascist. Our only choices are not, fully anonymized internet
| or CCP. There is a balance that can be hit. Likely, leaning
| too far to either side will result in consequences which
| outweigh the benefits.
|
| I am not sure where that balance should be placed. Everyone
| should have the ability to be anonymous or use encryption
| without backdoors, but this makes people untraceable.
| Probably the balance is close to what we already have today.
|
| I think you misrepresented the original commenter's
| perspective though.
| webdoodle wrote:
| What about the Euro model of localizing data, privacy laws,
| right to be forgotten, etc? It doesn't stop scrapers/data
| harvesters from accessing data, but it might slow it down a
| bit. Or does it really just keep upstarts from entering the
| infospace legally?
|
| Otherwise, I'm also concerned. Cyber crime laws didn't protect
| us from state sponsored hacks like Sabre, Antheim, OPM, etc.
| Combined with real-time psychology profiles based on
| personality, addictions, ideology, available for sale at
| Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, very dangerous information about
| people is in the hands of the 'enemy'. The real problem is even
| understanding who the enemy is, or how they will decide to
| abuse this information.
| ya_throw wrote:
| >The real problem is even understanding who the enemy is, or
| how they will decide to abuse this information.
|
| I'm quite sure that state-sponsored online warfare, both
| psychological and through system intrusion, is very active,
| and we are losing because we don't even know where or what is
| happening.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I don't think this would be a problem if we could divorce
| ourselves from using massive centralized internet services for
| everything. On a small forum if somebody is a troll it's pretty
| clear to the community. In fact, you get used to the trolls
| because you remember them by name. The small community should
| also be free to deal with it as they please.
|
| It's why I'm becoming more and more in favor of the nuclear
| option of repealing Section 230 just because it would break up
| the monoculture internet status quo.
| parentheses wrote:
| i don't agree. centralization allows for one solution. it
| also incentivizes the central authority to solve the problem
| rather than incur the wrath of government.
|
| the problem is not centralization. it is how the centralized
| authority is empowered and itself incentivized. i'm with the
| original commenter. the solution is better and more
| conscientious central government.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > In fact, you get used to the trolls because you remember
| them by name.
|
| There's a concept in feminism called the "missing stair",
| which is basically the complaint that whenever a community
| knows someone personally, they'll adapt their behavior to his
| rather than ruthlessly insisting that everyone needs to
| behave exactly the same way.
|
| I don't quite understand why that's supposed to be such a bad
| thing.
| mcguire wrote:
| Ever worked with a seriously toxic co-worker? One who
| couldn't be fired for whatever reason. Did you notice that
| work-flows quickly became, "How do we work around the
| jerk?" rather than "What is the best thing to do?"
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| > Why would you allow the above to happen to your citizens?
|
| In peace time, its logical to continue military developments on
| individual members of the public. Besides there are more
| constraints on military activity at times of war, biological &
| chemical weapons are banned, propaganda or pysops continues to
| be developed though as its not banned under any international
| convention. Psyops can both microtarget and blanket cover huge
| parts of the population.
|
| The public make the mistake in trusting those who rule over
| them.
| Borrible wrote:
| Just in the unlikely event of disarmament negotiations between
| cyber super powers in the future. You can count nukes and
| explosive power, but you can't count cyber weapons.
|
| A new deterrence doctrine,nobody knows what will happen.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| It's not totally unprecedented.
|
| It's hard to count HUMINT assets too, and yet it is the subject
| of negotiations.
|
| Biological weapons have been similar and are perhaps most
| analogous. Though, you can offer tours of your facilities and
| it's harder to hide large fermenters and the like. But it's
| much harder to identify offensive weapons research than it is
| offensive production.
| jason-phillips wrote:
| > A new deterrence doctrine, nobody knows what will happen.
|
| I'm quoting someone else's apropos statement here: "You don't
| just turn a country's electric grid back on."
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| It has already evolved. I don't want to rehash everything here,
| but I wrote something that made the rounds at the Munich
| security conference some years back and the bottom line is
| deterrence to massive cyberattack is via nuclear weapons.
|
| Do you like Moscow? Ok great. Keep the lights on stateside.
|
| That's the policy.
|
| I know it isn't what HN likes to hear but it's not like it
| doesn't exist. There is a reason the nuclear football has a
| switch to disable the internet for at least the USA and
| probably Canada too because of NORAD, etc. Even Matt Tait (aka,
| pwnallthethings) has talked about the "strategic threats" from
| the cyber domain of war at a completely unclassified conference
| in Miami and he ended the talk with a mushroom cloud up. I
| believe it was the keynote, but I can't quite remember.
| throwoutway wrote:
| Where is the source for the switch in the nuclear football to
| turn off the internet?
|
| I remember Obama wanted that option, but there was
| significant pushback and I thought the idea died on its own.
| What happened?
| s5300 wrote:
| I am also after this info. I believe the parent poster
| given his high reputation, I just hope he can point us to
| some sort of article about it as google is failing me
| Borrible wrote:
| I like the idea of adding rather vague threats, compared to
| kinetic weapons, with often not clearly or quickly
| identifiable causers/perpetrators as a possible justification
| for a nuclear weapon use.
|
| Increases the fun and excitement.
|
| Should become a "launch on warning" criterion.
| jmnicolas wrote:
| FWIW I tried to visit the website linked in your description
| but your certificate is invalid since November.
| jmnicolas wrote:
| Can't you just hide nukes or do they emit some radiations that
| are visible through satellites?
| Borrible wrote:
| >Can't you just hide nukes...
|
| The Russians say so.
|
| https://www.newsweek.com/russia-us-hiding-nuclear-
| weapons-13...
| jmnicolas wrote:
| The article refers to "clever accounting tricks" but
| doesn't say if a nuke that was never registered anywhere is
| detectable.
| mcguire wrote:
| It's not terribly difficult to hide nuclear warheads
| themselves. Their launch systems, however, require a
| significant amount of infrastructure that is usually easily
| visible. As is the infrastructure for building the warheads.
| cdiamand wrote:
| Looks like the USMA has taken defensive action against all the HN
| visitors pummeling it's website. (pages loading slowly, if at
| all)
| hereforphone wrote:
| Yeah I'm sure they're super busy trying to get less people from
| HN to read their content. Not a hug of death thing at all.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| The biggest defense on a societal level is a pervasive use of MFA
| for all applications, a good patching policy and backups.
| crims0n wrote:
| MFA and patching doesn't help much when your perimeter gets
| knocked over by a zero day. There is quite a bit more that goes
| into security than these surface level recommendations. It's
| why cybersecurity is such a hot field right now, with a massive
| talent shortage.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Not disagreeing, but Op's 'biggest' and 'societal' is not
| necessarily in disagreement with what you said, and leaves
| lots of room for necessary measures above and beyond.
| bitexploder wrote:
| People get compromised with MFA all the time. It's like
| 1/10th of a societal level solution. The real biggest part
| is also the hardest and that is education. Password
| managers, spotting phishing, spotting scam calls, using
| MFA, updating your software regularly, patching your
| ancient home router, etc. It takes a lot and these are all
| likely vectors you will get popped as a regular user in
| home equipment. There is no cure all and even as someone
| with 15 years of experience in the most technical parts of
| information security I have no simple solutions. Don't use
| computers lol.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| yes they do get compromised, but that doesn't mean you
| shouldn't use it. It also doesn't mean that's all you
| should use. If all of society used 2fa, we'd be much
| better, which is all OP was saying. Also, 1/10 can still
| be the biggest factor. but this is getting pedantic
| bitexploder wrote:
| I don't think it is pedantic at all. I have been in the
| most technical parts of the infosec industry for 15+
| years. The usability of security features and user
| education is the iceberg. Getting them to use MFA and
| such are the tip.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Most routers today have automatic patching schedules, so
| at least that one is getting better.
| giantg2 wrote:
| There's a talent shortage because most companies don't want
| to make security a priority. The executives just go "eh, we
| have insurance for that" beyond some base threshold of
| security focus. The companies don't want to train either. I
| see way more dev postings that security ones.
|
| I'm an application security champion (in addition to being a
| dev) at my company and I'm looking for a new job. I see very
| little for security and almost none that are entry level. The
| ones I do see don't pay as well as the dev jobs either.
| rocqua wrote:
| I'd expect in case of actual war, prepare for commercial
| network connectivity to fail.
|
| Satellites? Shot down.
|
| Fiber? ISP and higher-level routers are owned or simply DDOSed
|
| Cellular? what parts of the edge are owned is down, the core
| networks get targeted heavily. At best this will be spotty.
|
| The big internet-interconnects? Targets for cruise missiles and
| any other viable attacks.
|
| BGP? Fully poisoned and needs to be cleaned up before anything
| works.
|
| I'd expect the DoD to have their own networks up that are much
| more resilient. But our current highly interconnected, triered,
| and multi-faceted internet is going down the moment war between
| the great nations breaks out. It is simply too easy, and too
| valuable for the enemy not to do this.
| jmnicolas wrote:
| To your list I would add a nice virus that wipes clean all
| the hard drives in the commercial clouds.
|
| Just that would decimate the West and would need decades to
| recover from.
| jnurmine wrote:
| Unless EMPs also wipe out consumer electronics, there will
| likely be only islands of connectivity.
|
| I'm thinking folks with WIFI gadgets and COTS networking gear
| could very well build local connectivity, but those islands
| would be unable to talk to each other. The WIFI gadgets would
| have to mesh up over distances which are likely to exceed
| their range.
|
| Jamming and a generally dirty RF environment is likely in a
| war of such magnitude, so perhaps distributed laser links
| would work best, if one could create line of sight between
| the link nodes.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Also cutting underwater cables. In the news in the last few
| days as a potential act of war [0], and the real-world
| effects have already been , e.g. [1]
|
| [0] https://www.forces.net/news/chief-defence-staff-russia-
| cutti...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_submarine_cable_disrup
| tio...
| jason-phillips wrote:
| Those are good points, but there's quite a bit more to it than
| that.
|
| Off the top off my head, hunting within your network and
| reducing attackers' dwell time is another strong
| recommendation. Proxying internal network traffic with SSL-
| decrypt and rules-based analysis is another. Defining
| boundaries and firewalling off infrastructure to limit the
| blast radius is another. Scanning project code, dependencies
| and containers, and so on.
|
| It really requires a holistic approach and commitment. There is
| no one right answer here but it's something we all need to take
| seriously, imo.
|
| Disclosure: Have worked for several cyber-security startups
| with former .gov and .mil professionals while assisting many
| sensitive federal agencies myself.
| AyyWS wrote:
| Does SSL-Decryptand and rules-based analysis work? These are
| the times I've interacted with them: 1. Disabling SSL-Decrypt
| because it blocks HTTPS from PowerShell, bash, git, android
| studio and other comandline tools where I couldn't figure out
| how to trust our internal cert. I figured it out for Postman,
| but mostly I just couldn't figure it out. 2. Disabling or
| exempting rules that blocked our pharmacy app from going to
| webpages or perform SQL Queries that included legal drug
| names that were also illegal drug names.
|
| I think it's tough for non-security professionals who feel
| burdened and never get to see the benefits.
| jason-phillips wrote:
| Define "work". It's a layer in your overall plan. You
| should be able to apply it selectively and tweak as
| appropriate.
|
| If an internal resource is exfiltrating information
| somehow, the goal is to uncover that activity.
| blablabla123 wrote:
| It's worrying how IT security is getting militarized because
| conventional conflicts are getting less (which is a good thing)
| and thus military staff might be getting bored/lacking
| opportunities.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-01-12 23:01 UTC)