By Kevin Coleman — Defense Tech Cyberwarfare correspondent
NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen recently stated that “NATO will have to devote far greater attention to cyberspace,” — “There simply can be no true security without cyber security.” This comes after the sheer number of cyber attacks, sophistication behind the attacks’ strategies and their technical characteristics have caught most off guard. Many point to the fact that the world’s best and brightest technology companies have been compromised –saying if they can get hit – what chance does the rest of world (average organizations) have trying to defend their systems.
NATO must adopt a three prong cyber program strategy – Offensive Capabilities, Defensive Capabilities and also focus on Cyber Intelligence. Our research and analysis indicates that Cyber Intelligence is the most critical component and the one that presents the biggest challenges. Intelligence that focuses on an adversary’s cyber activities will be hard to come by, but is critical in getting ahead of attacks and exploits. While NATO has been fairly vocal about cyber attacks all along, they seem to be less aggressive when it comes to putting their verbal assertions into action. The strategic development of cyber intelligence capabilities and counter-cyber-intelligence as well will take some time — most likely years. Without question the biggest challenge NATO faces will be the interoperability with international law enforcement as the various areas of hostile cyber activities morph and boundaries become more a blur.
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The first strike in any future war will be spies and moles plugging in their flash drives and infecting the enemies secure networks with viruses.
Unfortunately, we are probably the most vulnerable to this type of attack.
Love it, NATO must step up but wasent it the Arab grooup that wanted action to begin with and what exactly are they contributing?
I hope we send them a Bill for it all!
Joint US-NATO CyberSecurity Command estd, & miscl groups worldwide.
Hre more IT types.
"IT" is a broad field of many specialties. It's like hiring "scientists" without distinguishing between physicists, chemists and biologists (the molecular kind and the "field" kind).
The private sector got good by buying the freedom of convicted hackers. Unfortunately, once you're domesticated by the threat of a jail sentence you're no longer quite as free to develop your abilities to hack into systems as you used to be.
What'll probably happen is that some sort of cyberdefense (we can't call it cyberwar or cyberattack anymore, we are "defense"-oriented, hah) department will maintain a few case officers and retain contacts with people outside of the fold, who will be bought, recruited or blackmailed into helping the government as needed. We will buy the services of clandestine zombienets to launch our attacks to give us plausible deniability. We will launch false-flag attacks against less valuable networks of our allies as part of grand strategy. We will infiltrate computer systems of nation states friendly to our enemies, and those of foreign citizens to learn what we need to learn. And if the arm is clandestine in nature, they can even surveil American citizens abroad and at home until someone leaks the fact that they are doing so and spurs legislation.
Hooray, a cyber-warfare related post that doesn't use the same few stock images.
Think of cyberwarfare like espionage, in that it crosses borders and is very clandestine. Perhaps the offensive arms need to be distributed between a clandestine service and a military arm.
More dreary marketing boilerpoint from Kevin.
I suspect that anything that makes it to the pages of the NYT or Washington Post gets used in Kevins cyberwarrior – $50 with a staples certificate – courses while any real network security insight is just beyond his understanding.
What is the relationship between UoMUC and DefTech? Are they sponsoring Kevin for his posts?
UoMUC like the CIA choose to advertize on this page because of the large number of people visiting the site. The operators of the site sell the ad space like most other web pages!
THE FBI FOLLOWS THE NATO ANNOUNCEMENT
The FBI now plans to increase their attention and resources on the increasing threat of cyber attacks over the next two years according to FBI Director Robert Mueller. "We will increasingly put emphasis on addressing cyber threats in all of the variations," Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was considering an extension of his 10-year term by two years.