No single state can deal alone with the threat posed by organised cyber attacks
Everyone knows what a computer hacker looks like: young, shy, dressed in T-shirt and trainers and based in a bedroom. Step forward Topiary, otherwise known as 18-year-old Jake Davis, who was arrested this week at his home in the Shetland Islands and is said to be connected to the hacking collectives LulzSec and Anonymous. Or the 14 people arrested last month by the FBI, and also linked to Anonymous, which launched an electronic assault on the payments website PayPal.
But there is another kind of hacker, too: much more mysterious, certainly more dangerous and far harder to contain. This week the cyber-security firm McAfee released details of what it called "Operation Shady RAT", a five-year attack on at least 72 governments and international organisations, including the US, India, Taiwan and the International Olympic Committee. But not, significantly, China. Is the Chinese government – or Chinese hackers and state organisations monitored by the government – responsible for this attack and others like it? Much evidence says that it is.
In July the Pentagon reported that a "foreign intelligence" service had hacked the systems of a contractor and obtained details of 24,000 files, including ones on missile tracking and remote drones. In June the IMF was hacked, causing the World Bank to suspend the computer connection to its sister organisation. Early this year Google reported details of Operation Aurora, a year-long attack on many of the titans of corporate America. The aim was to steal the intellectual property contained in their badly protected source code. "We look to China for an explanation," Hillary Clinton said afterwards. In February, in a speech on cyber-security, William Hague described an attempt to access secrets about the Trident missile system.
China, unsurprisingly, denies involvement. "It is hard to attribute the real source of attacks and we need to work together to make sure that this security problem won't be a problem," the country's defence minister said in June. And it is true that China is not the only suspect. Iran appears to be engaged in a low-level cyberwar with the US and Israel. India is being watched, too. The US, which says in some circumstances a cyber-attack could be considered an act of war, is scrambling to erect secure firewall barriers; Britain's national security strategy lists cyberwarfare as one of the principal threats.
No single state can deal with this alone. International co-operation is lacking. Britain and the US are pushing for a new international charter of data security. But words are no defence against electronic intrusion. In a world of instant connections, the bodies trying to stop hacking are themselves being hacked.
Jemima Kiss 05 Aug, 2011
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/04/cyber-security-firewalls
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