The attack against Danish, critical infrastructure [pdf]
sektorcert.dk
sektorcert.dk
While I was involved in a lot of critical infrastructure work over the years, there is so much mutually assured destruction on 'cyber' now that I don't see the economics of it anymore. Personally, I have doubts NATO can afford to act directly in a kinetic military capacity anymore and it has to operate through proxy parties because its members' infra is so exposed that no elected government survives a cyber retaliation against its energy and other infra services that derails its civil society. That said, I've held that belief for over a decade and haven't had it tested.
Of course, you only control your own choices not your competitors/opponents' choices, so game theory makes the outcome of "everyone chooses peace" nontrivial to achieve.
In the industrial era, the value is the profitable industry, which you just blew up with bombs to win the war, or had blown up loosing the war.
Either way, you spent an insane amount of money going to war offensively or defensively, not winning anything of value other than some barren land which is now worthless, and now you're also broke from the debt you took to fight an industrial war.
Advanced industry means wars are less likely to be profitable, not that they'll never occur.
The US is one big imperial war machine that protects its ownership class assets with their foreign policy, like any other superpower would.
"War profiteering", forceful opening of markets, huge contracts being made after all major wars, resource control?
The forever wars happening from the second world war up until now to keep the West on top. What "we" did to South America, to Iran, to African countries when they wanted their surplus?
Empire logic, game theory, nerdy statistical perspective even if you played a bit of civilisation or read Guns Germs and Steel.
Classical geopolitics 20 years ago was all about these game theories, propaganda, that it's all a big game of Risk, acquiring the most while dominating others like literally all of history.
What is war about today suddenly then? Beautiful philanthropic benevolence of the enlightened western peoples done very reluctantly but with great compassion for the future of the world despite immense expenses?
But maintaining large armies to do such conquering was massively expensive, and consider the extent to which various kings over the years have had their military ambitions crushed because their country or people could no longer tolerate the sacrifices required. The so-called slave labour still has to grow food to primarily feed itself, and this is a fairly full-time occupation in a pre-industrial state. There isn't a lot left over to sustain an occupying force in any sort of comfort (which incidentally isn't farming its home fields when it is doing the occupying).
Wars were often not between states but kings, and most people had no particular reason to favor one king over another. Armies often signaled famine and death, regardless of if they were "friendly" or not. Kings and their vassals usually maintained only small core forces. When more manpower was needed, armies could raised.
War didn't have to be particularly profitable. It only needed to be more profitable than business, which is often was in a zero-growth environment. And it was obviously risky.
The key thing was that nobody wanted a prolonged war, because it was expensive and pointless. Losing was often preferable. Sure the victors would kill some, enslave some, and rob some, but for most people, life would go on as before. Some elites would be different and they would swear allegiance to a different king, but most things would remain the same.
Sure, in principle putting in some fixed amount of resources to get a piece of land forever is worth it eventually. But that's not how it usually works out. If you conquer land from somebody, they don't roll over and accept that. Chances are you will be back on the same battlefield, fighting over that same land a couple decades later. Or if it's large enough empires fighting each other you fight over a different piece of land in a couple years. But either way, the country that can maintain peace without too many concessions and focus on their economy tends to be better off. The only major exception is colonization, where you fight against people who don't have a cohesive country that could retaliate later on.
The cost of war has arguably gone down a lot in the last two centuries or so, since we can now fight total war and have farmers ploughing the field at the same time, due to the insane efficiency gains in agriculture. At the same time the benefits of gaining land have gone down. Doubly so the benefits of gaining bombed-out land where the population was displaced by said war.
The taxable people often end up dead and the factories destroyed.
Since about the (Second) Industrial Revolution going after land really hasn't been a good way to gain wealth. Sarah Paine, Professor of History and Strategy at the US Naval War College has some interesting ideas in "The Geopolitics and History of Continental and Maritime Power":
MAD was possible because both cold war adversaries could verify. Satellite photos and espionage kept the score and the mutual decision was "Let's not". Cyber enjoys no such legibility, so there's a very real danger that one actor thinks "We'll get away with it, they won't/can't retaliate".
Thanks for being constructive though.
Native speakers know not to include it here, and I don't know why.
Native speakers would phrase it as "critical Danish infrastructure." Commas are only used to separate coordinate adjectives that are equal in importance. Here, "Danish" gives us an immutable property of the noun which is more important that "critical" which is a statement of quality.
"Broken critical Danish infrastructure" is also grammatically valid since it's "(condition) (quality) (national association) (noun)"
As a native speaker, I’m not convinced by this.
I do understand why someone would (knowing those rules) write "Danish critical infrastructure", possibly for emphasis, but it's not - and take this word very loosely - correct.
[0] https://www.gingersoftware.com/content/grammar-rules/adjecti...
For example, power infrastructure vs water infrastructure. If you said "power Danish infrastructure" or "water Danish infrastructure", power/water don't make sense as adjectives.
Sometimes "critical" is a qualifier like "critical condition" but in this case, it's a quality.
'Slå til Søren' possibly corrupted.
People named Søren suspected.
It's very upsetting, I love Danishes, so delicious.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/adj...
Secondly, whether to separate them with a comma:
https://getitwriteonline.com/commas-between-adjectives/
These two principles together seem to suggest "The attack against Danish critical infrastructure" (you would not put an "and" between them, and place comes before type), but to me, "The attack against critical Danish infrastructure" feels slightly better. I'm not sure why, but it might have something to do with my feeling that when I hear about an attack on infrastructure, perhaps the question of how serious it is puts any other adjective in context.
One could also say "The [May, 2023] attack on Denmark's critical infrastructure" or "The/An attack on critical infrastructure in Denmark."
The attack against Danish critical infrastructure
The attack against critical Danish infrastructure
In practice, as a southeastern US English speaker (if that matters?), adjectives closer to the noun rank higher in emphasis. I'm sure there are exceptions (ugh, English), but increasing-emphasis ordering if it's a generic bag-of-adjectives.
“Critical Danish infrastructure” tells me it is critical infrastructure perhaps made anywhere but deployed in Denmark.
It is surprisingly ambiguous though.
The whole report is full of wrong commas, for written English. Quite embarrassing.
[0] https://dsn-dk.translate.goog/ordboeger/retskrivningsordboge...
This is super annoying because at the same time school mandated computers and calculators will use a confusing mixture of the two depending on whether you are using local software or online software or a physical device intended for another market.
I know it won't happen, but that would be amazing.
[1] https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/117982/central-...
This is what you get from using inconsistent symbols for important functions, I would not be surprised at all if people died over '.' vs ',' in a piece of medical gear or avionics.
I'd use a completely new symbol before repurposing an old one. And in a way the '*' that computer languages tend to use for multiplication serves as a nice way to avoid mixups (as opposed to 'x').
To the contrary I envisage many ESL readers will learn about comma usage today.
The frustration in native English speakers probably comes from the fast the comma-less version would probably be unambiguous and that comma causes our brains to skip a beat for what we subconsciously believe is an unnecessary purpose.
If all English headlines were written to be clear rather than as easy as possible to read, the overall state of news would probably be better....
The attack happened in May 2023. The publication is from November 2023.
Anyone else find it alarming that critical infrastructure is being protected by a fairly low end Taiwanese networking vendor and not a more well known firewall brand?
Like Cisco with their regular CVEs?
It's why I use QBasic for my firewalls.
In this case, a single-packet pre-auth root code exec is about as bad as it gets. I don’t recall the last time a major vendor had a doozie like that.
Bugs happen, but having them wildly exploitable isn’t inevitable.
Having regular CVEs signals only one thing - the product is popular
Nice dramatisation though. Very intense.