WEB OF UNCERTAINTY — “As the world’s most technically advanced nation, the United States is also potentially the most vulnerable to foreign cyberthreats,” John Markoff warned in The New York Times more than two decades ago, in October 1999. Like the nuclear threat of the Cold War, which loomed over daily life for nearly half a century, the possibility of “simultaneous computer network attacks against banking, transportation, commerce and utility targets — as well as against the military,” as the Times put it long before the internet was a central to society as it is today, has become part of the backdrop of modern life. Those fears became more vivid — more real — than ever before on Monday evening, when President Joe Biden, addressing business leaders, said “the magnitude of Russia’s cyber capacity is fairly consequential and it’s coming.” Trillions of dollars have been spent on cybersecurity this century. Despite that, as a society, we are less resilient to cyberattacks today than we were in 1999. Ridesharing services that rely on networked communications and positioning systems have largely replaced taxis that relied on drivers who knew their way around; smartphones have become essential to the conduct of business; even grocery stores are growing dependent on sophisticated computational surveillance systems. Even so, it is hard to know what to make of Biden’s warning. On the one hand, he is privy to secret intelligence, and that intelligence was right about Vladimir Putin’s willingness to invade Ukraine with an army of tanks and airplanes. On the other, cyber pundits have so far been mistaken about the cyberwar that was supposed to accompany Putin’s Ukraine invasion. “They will do things that will ruin people and cause great harm. This is a serious thing. It’s not just about making the lights go on and off,” Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the former commanding general of the U.S. Army Europe, told POLITICO’s Maggie Miller in January. And Jonathan Reiber, the former chief strategy officer for cyber policy in Obama’s Pentagon said in January, “This may end up being the first declared hostility where cyberspace operations are a part of an integrated offensive military invasion.” That hasn’t happened. Even as Ukraine has been pummeled by bombs and artillery strikes, cyberattacks have been — so far — muted in Ukraine, and there haven’t yet been any notable attacks on the U.S. In an article coming Wednesday morning in POLITICO that examines why Russia hasn’t launched major cyberattacks in Ukraine (and is available to POLITICO Pro subscribers right now ), Hodges acknowledges that the “cyber juggernaut” he expected never materialized. It’s unclear whether this is because Russia didn’t want to, or because it couldn’t. Russia’s brutal invasion has lacked strategic coherence, in the cyber realm as in others. Had cyberattacks made it harder for Ukrainians to communicate, it seems inevitable that Volodymyr Zelenskyy would have been less effective at drumming up international support for Ukraine. The exact extent of Russia’s cyber capabilities remains opaque. If Russia is capable of a serious cyberattack against the U.S., then now, after Russia has been frustrated in its attempt to swiftly conquer Ukraine, could be the moment when it comes. Because cyberattacks are generally difficult to definitively attribute, they could provide a way for Putin to bring the war to Americans while making it difficult for U.S. policymakers to retaliate in kind. Plus, as Biden said Monday, in the U.S. it’s the private sector, not the government, that largely decides “the protections we will or will not take” against cyberattacks that might disrupt our electricity or our water supplies. He called on business leaders to do their part to “secure every American’s privacy.” So far, since Markoff’s essay in 1999, the possibility of what was then called an electronic Pearl Harbor, and more recently a cyber Pearl Harbor, has remained just that: a possibility. The cyberattacks that have taken place, like the Colonial Pipeline ransomware incident, have been headaches for their targets but not world-historical catastrophes. If a momentous, long-feared attack from Russia does come, that could change. The world could be reshaped in unpredictable ways, as it was after Sept. 11, 2001, and as it was after the onset of the pandemic. Cyberattacks can have temporary effects, or they can have more lasting ones. A blackout that lasted months would transform life, as food spoiled and hospital generators ran out of gas, and might be treated as an act of war. To be clear, these are purely speculative threats. They don’t seem realistic, nor worth worrying about. Planning for very low probability but very high impact events — a cyber black swan — is nearly impossible. It feels a little irresponsible even to speculate about them. But then, the idea that the world would endure nearly two years of lockdowns as businesses shut globally once seemed far-fetched too. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at kkakaes@politico.com, or on Twitter at @kkakaes.
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