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Comment by apeace | Hacker News Reader

This is merely a taste of what is to come.

When President Obama stated in December[0] that we will deliver a "proportional response" to Russian hacking at the "time and place of our own choosing", it seemed that most of the country was proud, almost gleeful at the thought that we would be striking back. I for one was mortified.

We should not be escalating cyberwar, even if we do have proof of who attacked us. People are going to die. We can see from this article that hacking can cause serious real-world problems.

When we strike back, does Russia then strike back again? What does it look like after four or five volleys? Will entire power grids be down for days or weeks? Will the stock market crash?

It's time for the American people to demand that the N.S.A. become a defensive organization, not an offensive one. And it's time for us to demand peace in general. Cyberwar is war.

[0] http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/15/politics/obama-russia-hacking-...

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> When we strike back, does Russia then strike back again? What does it look like after four or five volleys? Will entire power grids be down for days or weeks? Will the stock market crash?

And at what point, after "cyber-damaging" some piece of critical infrastructure (and/or harming/killing people), does the the other side run out of exploits and just launch actual missiles instead?

Do these missiles require a working communications network? If this goes on long enough, there might not be any way to launch them.

Why do you think that different countries have put missiles in submarines ?

And Russia reportedly even has a deadmans-switch that can be triggered by seismic activity on Russian soil and rapid changes in air pressure. I'd presume that such a system is not connected to the internet.

All of those systems predate the Internet, so you bet nuclear capabilities will not be affected much by cyber attacks.

Nuclear capabilities will probably not be affected much by cyber attacks over the internet. There are other vectors, but they obviously require a much more serious investment in espionage, spycraft, etc.

Isn't this literally the denoument of Dr Strangelove?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand_(nuclear_war)

I know not with what weapons the first world cyberwar will be fought, but I know the second will be fought with floppy disks.

This is an under-appreciated point. We've forgotten all the old hard Cold War lessons about escalation.

What we are seeing now is a huge expansion of deniable and proxy warfare. Everyone is still (I hope) clear that sending an actual tank division across the Polish/Ukraine border would be met with nukes. So the question is, what is the largest most damaging attack that can be carried out without reprisal, and how do the participants find this out?

And of course, the ultimate in deniable attacks is one carried out by the enemy's own forces. Did cyberwarfare crash a US destroyer into a cargo ship? (Almost certainly not, but maybe next time). SWAT-ing is already established as a tactic; could suitably forged communications or "fake news" disseminated via the President lead to the SWAT-ing of a country? There are some suggestions that this applies to the Qatar situation.

> SWAT-ing of a country

Iraq comes to mind, although the forged information came from the invading country's own services.

I think Ahmed Chalabi played a key role there as well, and there are suggestions that he was an Iranian agent.

There's no denying that Ahmed Chalabi was an Iranian agent of influence, but whether he was working for the Iranian clandestine services is unknown.

That should come as a hint that state actors are not the only ones capable of deploying informational weapons.

> Everyone is still (I hope) clear that sending an actual tank division across the Polish/Ukraine border would be met with nukes.

Only if those tanks are under foreign flags. If they're under "rebel" flags, then nobody cares.

The primary way for the NSA to be a defensive organization would be for it to very publicly take a lead in closing up the holes they find on a structural level.

Whether the NSA hoards zero-day exploits or not isn't the big issue since someone will be doing that. The issue is they should be sounding the alarm on whatever broad class of system vulnerabilities they find.

They should be evangelizing against remotely updateable hard drive firmware, against insecure IoT devices and similar things.

This is so obvious and true that everyone cannot help but overlook it.

What happened to the days when the NSA helped make world class crypto like AES256 in a public forum?

I think the world-class individuals who made the NSA into a competent organization left after the end of the Cold War. It looks to have been run by wingnuts ever since; Keith Alexander's "Star Trek" room ( https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/15/nsa-mi... ) comes to mind.

> The issue is they should be sounding the alarm on whatever broad class of system vulnerabilities they find.

Sounds like the IAD mission. Examples:

- https://github.com/iadgov/Pass-the-Hash-Guidance/blob/master...

- https://www.iad.gov/iad/library/reports/nsa-methodology-for-...

I mention that first one especially because Pas-The-Hash was a major reason the most recent ransomware outbreak was able to get onto already-patched machines.

My gawd, Firefox is telling the iad's security certificate is broken. Now if there was ever a sign the world is going to heck, that would be it.

on this page they try to explain:

https://www.nsa.gov/what-we-do/information-assurance/

> Note: The IAD.Gov website uses TLS 1.2, supported by a Department of Defense (DoD) PKI certificate, to ensure confidentiality and integrity for all users. IAD.Gov website users will need to have the current DoD Root and Intermediate Certificate Authorities (CA) loaded into their browsers to avoid receiving untrusted website notifications.

I mean it still doesn't make sense ... Where it says "for all users" it should say "for those who have this certificate installed" because that's what the warning is about. And "to avoid receiving untrusted website notifications" should read "for a more secure connection" because, you know, what's the goal here, really? :)

I'm not a coder but from listening around here. What if a government agency took the lead to develop a safer open source operating system. With the knowledge they have regarding attack vectors. they would seem to have elevated insight n what to avoid.

Oh what a world we live in where cyberwarfare could result in death. I would have never thought, as a kid, that life (and death) would end up this "real".

The hacker Karl Koch [1] thought being responsible for the disaster at Chernobyl [2] back in 1986 causing 2M deaths in the last 30 years. I think we will never know whether he was right or not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Koch_(hacker)

[2] (German) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/KGB-Hack

I'm confused what the connection is with Chernobyl.

But 2M deaths in the last 30 years is not likely correct - this interesting WHO report on the matter suggests the final toll from the radiation would be more like "up to 4k":

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/

http://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/chernobyl/chernobyl_di...

> The main causes of death in the Chernobyl-affected region are the same as those nationwide — cardiovascular diseases, injuries and poisonings — rather than any radiation-related illnesses

>> The main causes of death in the Chernobyl-affected region...

The Chernobyl-affected region includes big parts of Western Europe. Back then in 1986 my godfather was cleaning trains coming from Russia through Ukraine (but not directly from the Chernobyl region) and was contaminated. He lost his teeth and hair. We lived ca. 800 km away from Chernobyl.

On the other hand thanks the river Dnepr the Chernobyl region is connected to the Ukraine ground water system. The astimation of 2M deaths caused by long time effects of contamination comes from a friend from Kiew. She never drunk tap water.

While not affecting humans directly, an indication of the far reach of Chernobyl is that sheep farmers in parts of Norway still have to medicate the herd.

It's such an extraordinary claim that, without evidence, it's reasonable enough to dismiss. The causes of Chernobyl have been pretty exhaustively thrashed out, and it all seems pretty well explained without any hacking intrusion.

If every claim like this has to be met with a shrug and "I guess we'll never know the truth" then it becomes very hard to ever know anything, because there's always some nutter willing to claim something that's totally at odds with all the available evidence.

The cause of the Chernobyl disaster are extremely well researched and documented; the explosion was caused by a planned test that went terribly wrong. Nothing I have read indicates anything about a hack, and everything can be explained by the actions of the people physically present.

> The hacker Karl Koch [1] thought being responsible for the disaster at Chernobyl [2] back in 1986 causing 2M deaths in the last 30 years.

I don't think that's right, the German wikipedia article says:

> Im April 1986 kam es zur Katastrophe von Tschernobyl. Karl Koch, zu diesem Zeitpunkt schon lange schwer drogenabhängig und in einem oft zweifelhaften geistigen Zustand, sah dies als unmittelbare Folge eines seiner Hacks an, da er kurz vorher in den Rechner eines Atomkraftwerks eingedrungen war.

Unless my understanding of German is flawed, what I'm reading is that it was Koch's drug-fueled paranoia that made him believe he was responsible for the Chernobyl disaster because he had recently hacked into a computer in a nuclear power station. It doesn't say whether this computer even was in Chernobyl, maybe he didn't know exactly where the computer on the other end was, or maybe it was more paranoia. He was, after all, in a pretty bad state near the end of his "career".

It's such a fascinating and sad story, this guy. I've watched the film "23 nichts ist wie es scheint" (initially because of the RAW/Discordia/Illuminatus Trilogy references) a long time ago, but I don't remember anything about Chernobyl in that film (but it was a long time ago).

There was another film, a US movie IIRC, that tells his story from the side of an FBI or CIA (or some agency) agent chasing him. I forget the title, anyone know?

How big is the space of potential exploits?

If organization A searches for exploits for five years in a given piece of software, and organization B does the same, what percentage of the exploits they find will be found by both rather than just one?

If hackers/governments tend to find the same exploits as each other then it makes more sense to take a defensive strategy since you can protect against a large portion of the weapons your enemies develop. But if there's not much overlap in which exploits are found then an offensive strategy may make more sense.

In the nuclear arms race there was basically one type of attack and one set of mitigations. In cyberwarfare there are potentially endless types of attacks, each with its own set of mitigations. This changes the calculus.

The likelihood of one's weapons being stolen and used against you, your allies, or humanity in general is also a huge consideration.

> When we strike back, does Russia then strike back again?

It seems that Russia is happy to continually strike regardless of retaliation.

I don't want the NSA to become a defensive organization. I like that Iran's nuclear program is being delayed. That's not a defensive action.

You don't seem to be proposing that the NSA become defensive, either. If Russia attacks us and we don't respond, that's not even defensive. That's dismantling.

A defensive response would be to inform major vendors of our own infrastructure (i.e. Microsoft, Cisco) of the gaping holes in their systems, instead of leaving them open for the world to attack.

I can name at least one netsec guy who attributes his entire team's existence to the NSA calling his employer and doing exactly that.

Right. It's a false dichotomy that the NSA doesn't do that and needs to disarm itself. There's a happy middle ground where people don't attack us because they're worried about our retaliation and we also improve our own defenses.

Sounds like that netsec guy's team serves military customers then?

No, they do design work for consumer products.

But good job reading my prior comments :)

What type of consumer products? And I'm not sure what comments you're referring to.

so you want to live in a world where both countries don't have any power? Sounds Utopian.

Defence is only card in this game worth playing especially when it comes to infrastructure attacks.

Yes, that would suck. But that's the aggresor's decision, not ours.

I'm not sure why we collectively decided to lack courage, but it's unsettling.

> I'm not sure why we collectively decided to lack courage

In this case courage is stupidity. Why waste time knocking out their power when we can spend that time making our power more secure. You're like a web master with a downed site due to a DDOS going:

> Well I've DDOSed the attacker's site so its okay

no its not, you've achieved nothing. Get with the program; this is a defence world not an offence one.

In situations where Person A is attacking Person B and making it sound like Person A's solution is the only one, Person A is usually mistaken.

My mind is open. Convince me. Why is it a good idea to remove the threat of retaliation from our toolkit? It seems like one of the most persuasive reasons not to attack us.

I will attack you yet convince you that someone else attacked you. Now you're off attacking the wrong person and your power grid IS STILL OFFLINE.

Just put all the effort into keeping the grid up. Absorb all attacks and then export that IP and tech for healthy profit. Its the only winning move.

Obviously attribution becomes far more important with cyberattacks, but that's a tangential point.

You're acting like the power grid going offline is equivalent to a thermonuclear explosion. Yes, it will suck, but it's temporary. And afterwards, those exploit vectors will be patched.

> Obviously attribution becomes far more important with cyberattacks, but that's a tangential point.

No its not, its the whole point. The point of the age of information is that it is a departure from the age of blood and steel. The tactics of blood and steel that you are supporting have no place in this future and are counter-productive. The point of the age of information is that power is no longer solely in the hands of nations. Therefore treating it as a case of "stomping on the bad people" means your attack spread increases from all the nations in the world to all the people in the world. Added to that the evidence of those attacks can and will be forged. You're chasing shadows and its not worth it. Just build a better shield, that's all that matters.

Yes. This. Old government people think of everything in terms of "weapons" and "wars" and they still think the word "cyber" is cool. We need to promote, like, a radical new school of thought about software: Creators of a system should be fully responsible for whatever damage the system causes. A bug is a bug, whether it's exploited by an outside actor or it happens during normal execution. Developers should be responsible for bugs. I like the "defective lock" analogy from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14663474

Defense may be the only game worth playing, but how will that work? Unlike the real military where civilians simply don't own the hardware, in computer security they do.

NSA isn't a hardware or software vendor, and the corporations that are don't have much of a profit motive to heavily invest in security. They aren't actually liable for problems unlike say a car manufacturer that releases a faulty product, which leaves what exactly... reputation that takes a hit? But every vendor has bugs and security issues and the market isn't really punishing anyone.

Is the future effectively an enormous government subsidy to profitable corporations (i.e. NSA and other US government agencies basically become extensions of corporate America's QA department)? Is the future heavy regulations to create the proper financial incentives and/or penalties so corporations start seriously spending on security?

It's easy to say "the government should do something!!" but what exactly will that look like?

Regulate operating systems. Fund programs and research to work out how to create operating systems for our infrastructure that contain less zero days. Ensure we're the ones that find the zero days first.

The reason we're vulnerable is because we're unwilling to pay the cost of finding the exploits but people in developing nations ARE because they work for "less".

Right now our economies and systems reward those that fly by their pants and don't care for security. That is the problem. The free buffet of infinite growth from technology startups is the very thing that also gives us this pain and we need to learn to eat less.

I see that going wrong too. If operating systems need to be certified, where does that leave free open source projects?

This would take an extraordinary departure from our current politics. Government intruding on software would (rightly) cause cries from the most stalwart Free Software advocates and from proprietary software companies.

Can you imagine the outcry if a new Linux fork had to seek government approval in order to post their distribution?

Can you expect Google or Oracle to fail to lobby the government to make sure they don't have to get each major revision certified?

Not in order to post their distribution! Approval for usage in critical infrastructure.

Critical infrastructure, IMO, should:

- not use general purpose operating systems

- maybe not use general purpose computers (just build custom FPGA logic to control power grids and stuff)

- not use internet connected computers

- maybe not use computers at all when possible

Regulate operating systems.

When we're trying to protect ourselves from the vulnerabilities hoarded by our government, I think that asking them to regulate the OS might just be a step backward.

Regulation, especially for software powering critical systems. We'd have to have a good definition for what critical means, probably with different levels that escalate the security requirements.

Change the law and make them liable. This would let the market solve the problem, but there is no way microsoft, cisco and the like would go for it.

> so you want to live in a world where both countries don't have any power? Sounds Utopian.

Or post-apocalyptic.

"Cyberweapons" should be treated like bioweapons: there should be a framework of international law to decommission them, because they are simply too prone to spreading on their own and too dangerous to civilians. The US does not have a defensive anthrax capability (I believe), because it's too much of a liability.

What is a cyber weapon? Knowledge of a vulnerability? Exploit code? How do you propose regulating it? Much of this has been tried before and ended up hurting rather than helping.

Cyberweapons created by the USA were used to shut down the entire national hospital system of the UK, one of their biggest allies. Good job USA!

Iran is educated enough to make nuclear weapons, but you want their program shut down because you think they're not responsible enough to be trusted with nuclear weapons.

The US is educated enough to make cyber-weapons, but I want their program shut down because I think they're not responsible enough to be trusted with cyber-weapons.

Maybe the UK should go on the offensive, wipe a few NSA datacenters, for the long term safety of the British people?

You are applying logic to politics, if that worked we wouldn't have problems.

We demand Iran disarm to shame them on the world stage as violators of non-proliferation treaties, and we only do this because they are our "enemy" if they weren't we would care. It cronyism and nepotism just on the scales of nations, and I don't think that can change for a while.

Man's way to peace is by having a bigger gun than his neighbor.

At some point, someone will use their Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo, and that'll be the end of that.

Thus ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity for the termites scuttling through the ruins of human civilization. Sounds like a plan.

The problem is such traditional calculus doesn't apply anymore in cyberwar.

For one thing, your big "guns" weaken your own infrastructure, since you use about the same technology that your adversary uses too. Secondly, your guns can be copied without many problems and then suddenly they are directed at you and your weakened infrastructure.

That's obscenely naive.

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