cyberwar

A new RAND Corporation report suggests the U.S. may be better off playing defense and pursuing diplomatic, economic, and prosecutorial efforts against cyberattackers, instead of making strategic cyberwarfare an investment priority.

The study comes as the U.S. military fires up its new unified Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) program this month. The new outfit will be responsible for network-related operations, defense, and attacks and will operate under the U.S. Strategic Command.

Cyberwarfare is better at bothering an adversary than defeating it--given that permanent effects are illusive, author Martin C. Libicki wrote in the report, titled "Cyberdeterrence and Cyberwar.&… Read more

This story was originally published at CBSNews.com.

Somewhere deep in Washington's national security apparatus, more than a few old-timers surely pine for the clarity of the Cold War. Black versus white, American versus Russian, spy versus spy--the good old days.

Now, however, they face more ephemeral threats from shadowy foes that prefer to cloak their identities.

"There's a cyberwar going on," said Ed Giorgio, who spent nearly 30 years with the National Security Agency before starting an IT security consultancy in 2007. The problem, he says, is that identifying an online adversary isn't as easy as pinpointing an enemy tank formation.

"Adversaries are just as likely to be nationalists as they are likely to be countries," said Giorgio, echoing a theme that cybersecurity experts say is likely to shape the Pentagon's approach to building Internet defenses in an increasingly networked world.

The extent of the problem was hinted at earlier in the day by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. In an upcoming 60 Minutes interview, Gates told CBS News anchor Katie Couric that the United States is "under cyberattack virtually all the time, every day" and that his department will more than quadruple the number of experts to battle cyber attacks. … Read more

Back from covering the Defcon hacker fest, CNET News' Declan McCullagh explains the aftermath of a decision by a federal judge granting the Massachusetts transit authority's request for an injunction, preventing three MIT students from giving a presentation about hacking smart cards used in the Boston subway system...Olympics viewership is stronger than it's been in the last decade. But the company still hasn't figured out a strategy to best take advantage of the Internet. Webware's Rafe Needleman has a few suggestions...With hostilities escalating between Russia and Georgia, the battle has now predictably crossed over … Read more

Here's a headline you could have found crossing the news wires any time in the last decade: "Pentagon worried, China upgrading cyberwarfare capabilities."

But now Uncle Sam is really starting to fret. A new Pentagon report to Congress on the state of China's military (PDF) describes the People's Liberation Army as being on a march to acquire a more potent information technology-fighting capacity.

Looking more than a decade over the horizon, the Pentagon expects China to try to gain expertise that would allow it to strike foreign communications and logistics nodes, as well as financial … Read more

This week we've seen two Internet events that are more alike than dissimilar. On Wednesday, an Estonian court convicted a 20-year Russian for his part in last spring's distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on that nation. On Thursday, word of mounting DDoS attacks on the Church of Scientology spread. Ultimately, both events could have larger repercussions.

The attack on the Estonian Web sites was prompted by an Estonian government plan to move a statue and grave sites honoring Russian-Estonians who died fighting the Nazis. Gadi Evron of Beyond Security said at last year's Black Hat USA that he … Read more

A 20-year-old Russian has been convicted for organizing some of the attacks on Estonia's government sites during spring 2007, the Agence France-Presse reported on Thursday.

"Dmitri Galushkevich is the first hacker to be sentenced for organizing a massive cyberattack against an Estonian Web page," Gerrit Maesalu, spokesman for the regional prosecutor's office in northeast Estonia, told the AFP. Galushkevich was fined 17,500 krooni (about $1,600). He admitted his guilt, said Maesalu.

The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which some security experts have alternatively called a flash mob or the first-ever cyberwar, was prompted … Read more