I write about the broad intersection of data and society.
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This past March Bloomberg offered a compelling look inside the world of election hacking in which campaigns and their supporters hack into their opponents and steal or destroy data, saturate the online space with fake messaging and otherwise attempt to skew the election in their favor. Given the subsequent unveiling of the successful hack of the DNC here in the United States and the previous hacks of both campaigns in 2008, the article appears all the more prescient.
Indeed, this past April the head of the US Cyber Commandtestified before Congress that there was growing concern that hackers of the future will not simply steal data, but will instead penetrate computing systems and subtly change critical data in-place in such a way that the victim can no longer trust any of its data and doesn’t know what’s real or what has been changed.
NBC today published a fascinating look at how cyberwarfare has expanded beyond the purely digital realm to mission critical physical systems like GPS. Tracking systems based on GPS and using cellular backhauls have become commonplace in tracking valuable cargo, corporate vehicles and in police surveillance. However, the NBC article notes that GPS jammers have now become so commonplace that they can be purchased for a few tens of dollars online and plugged into a vehicle cigarette lighter jack, with criminals now routinely deploying them on the off chance that their stolen cargo might be carrying a tracker. Even enterprising employees are beginning to deploy them in an attempt to avoid their corporate office being able to track their vehicle.
What makes this so fascinating is that GPS jammers were formerly the exclusive province of the military, requiring highly specialized and extremely expensive equipment. Today such devices are widely available via the internet, very cheap and require no expertise to operate.
Moreover, GPS spoofing like that of James Bond’s movie Tomorrow Never Dies, in which nearby GPS receivers are tricked into thinking they are at a different location is also becoming increasingly accessible. In fact, almost identically to the plot line of that movie, a set of academic researchers managed to send a 213-foot yacht several hundred yards off course without any of the onboard navigation systems being the slightest bit aware of the treachery.
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Of course, this comes on top of this past December’s incident in which hackers cut power to multiple cities in Ukraine, while last year a German steel mill was “massively” damaged when hackers remotely overrode control systems. Indeed, the vulnerabilities of the cyber world are increasingly leaching into the physical world, with the US Government itself racing to develop cyber weapons designed to “trigger a nuclear plant meltdown; open a dam above a populated area, causing destruction; or disable air traffic control services, resulting in airplane crashes.”
As I wrote last November on the rising threat of “cyber first strike” capacity, one of the most fascinating aspects of the rise of cyberwarfare is the leveling effect it has in permitting non-state or non-military actors to operate on equal footing with the most powerful state militaries, while the deniability of an attack makes it particularly attractive for psychological warfare. In the case of the DNC hack, media reports have attributed the attack to Russia, which the Russian government staunchly denies. Even if the US Government formally attributes the attack, there are relatively few good options to strongly deter future attacks that do not involve retaliatory action.
Yet, the biggest story here is that any external actor, whether a Russian government employee or a disaffected teenager working from his or her parent’s basement, could hack into the DNC, steal a treasure-trove of documents and then release them to force the resignation of key party leadership on the eve of an election. That ability to externally influence a presidential election is something that the US has simply not had to confront to date. Despite having one of the largest and most powerful militaries in the world and being the birthplace of many of the technologies behind the modern internet, the US is unable to secure its campaigning process from external influence.
The reason for this is that the cyber world does not obey the geographic boundaries of the state. In the physical world, the US military is able to provide a protective deterrence against any external actor wishing to harm its citizens and companies. In the cyber world, there is no similar correlate to such deterrence and, as I noted in November, the legal landscape governing how companies can offensively counter cyber threats is still murky and unproven.
Add to this the decreasing control citizens have over their electronic devices, the increasing general consumer availability of former military technologies like GPS jamming/spoofing and drones and the mainstreaming of basic cyberattack techniques that allow even talented high schoolers to successfully operate on par with nation states and the future is looking a bit more 1984ish each day. It is certainly conceivable that in the coming decade the very concept of “privacy” will completely disappear as everything from our medical records to our daily conversations become public record, while our televisions to our children’s toys spy on us in our homes. This is the privacy-less future of 1984, only this time it is not a single monolithic state operating the global surveillance network, but rather individual hackers spanning the globe. Welcome to the future of cyberwarfare.
How Cyberwar From Hacking To GPS Jamming Is Changing The Face Of Society
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