Home > Work > Cyberwar: The Next Threat to National Security & What to Do About It
1 " I have been taught by senior national security officials for decades never to bring them a problem without also suggesting a solution. "
― Richard A. Clarke , Cyberwar: The Next Threat to National Security & What to Do About It
2 " the generators on most subgrids spin at 60 Megahertz. "
3 " On October 1, 2009, a general took charge of the new U.S. Cyber Command, a military organization with the mission to use information technology and the Internet as a weapon. Similar commands exist in Russia, China, and a score of other nations. These military and intelligence organizations are preparing the cyber battlefield with things called “logic bombs” and “trapdoors,” placing virtual explosives in other countries in peacetime. "
4 " When the term “cyber war” is used in this book, it refers to actions by a nation-state to penetrate another nation’s computers or networks for the purposes of causing damage or disruption. When the Israelis attacked Syria, they used light and electric pulses, not to cut like a laser or stun like a taser, but to transmit 1’s and 0’s to control what the Syrian air defense radars saw. "
5 " North Korea gets a high score for both “defense” and “lack of dependence.” North Korea can sever its limited connection to cyberspace even more easily and effectively than China can. Moreover, North Korea has so few systems dependent upon cyberspace that a major cyber war attack on North Korea would cause almost no damage. Remember that cyber dependence is not about the percentage of homes with broadband or the per capita number of smart phones; it’s about the extent to which critical infrastructures (electric power, rails, pipelines, supply chains) are dependent upon networked systems and have no real backup. "
6 " For a period of several years in the mid-1990s the Chinese talked very openly, for a Communist police state, about what they had learned from the Gulf War. They noted that their strategy had been to defeat the U.S. by overwhelming numbers if a war ever happened. Now they concluded that that strategy would not work. They began to downsize their military and invest in new technologies. One of those technologies was wangluohua, “networkization,” to deal with the “new battlefield of computers. "
7 " The U.S. military is no more capable of operating without the Internet than Amazon.com would be. Logistics, command and control, fleet positioning, everything down to targeting, all rely on software and other Internet-related technologies. And all of it is just as insecure as your home computer, because it is all based on the same flawed underlying technologies and uses the same insecure software and hardware. "