New Chinese Cyberattacks: What’s to Be Done?

The first step is to recognize that this is not a technical issue but a political/diplomatic/military one. The second requirement for anything useful to happen is for Western governments to find some balls and start standing up to China in general. With those two changes in place, the groundwork is laid for a meaningful engagement on this specific issue. The likelihood of either happening is nil, so expect China to continue on its current trajectory. Eventually it will come down to whether Western corporations are willing to allow their governments to disconnect China from the rest of the world. Some will demand it, tired of incessant attacks; others will lobby fiercely against it, greedy for what they see as a profitable place to do business. Like so many issues in the West today, it will come down to one group of corporate lobbyists against another, both pushing for deeply suboptimal outcomes relative to what a sane world would have imposed years earlier.

We could dramatize what's been going on for decades as something new and urgent and then pass tomes of legislation handing trillions to the DHS and intelligence agencies.

Much of this commentary was written while the attack was still in progress; it presumes that Github would be forced to fold, and goes on to assess tye consequences. This has been... overtaken by events.

A few thoughts dredged up:

- Coldly, the US citizens and companies broadly views the internet as a way to make cash, and generally will pursue that.

- Free speech concerns and the decentralized power of the internet are of interest to "damn fool idealists", as Kenobi might say. Not your major business powers. Google's play is very revealing here...

- China is extremely interested in their own sovereignty and control of the China-sphere, with soft power exercised elsewhere.

The obvious easy way forward is for companies to capitulate to Beijing and let the cash flow. This is likely the most common occurrence today. Some companies will take the higher road, particularly the more idealistic ones with fat cash bags.

The argument that the State department should be involved is probably the correct one, but one wonders exactly what leverage can be applied, since China has spent decades building local apps and infrastructure.

I would be extremely interested in tokenadult's take on this, as he is very familiar with China.

The Chinese view is that an attempt to subvert their control, which typically amounts to some form of censorship, makes you a viable target. They are following: best defense is an offense. (It's interesting to compare this to the legal 'attacks' from European demands on google "freedom to be forgotten" and restraints on freedom of speech surrounding holocaust denial) One suggestion is to daily and publicly publish, in a simple format, trans-national internet attacks and to link those to imposed trade tariffs. Following outrage and denials, this might result in either complete Balkanization or a retreat to more defensive measures (e.g. the great internet wall of china)

New Everyone Cyberattacks: What's to Be Done?

Four things, each with their own time horizon and in parallel.

1. Norms for cyber warfare and international cyber activity to be developed. (The US may not be able to lead this post-Snowden, but they should try and should be involved.)

2. Cooperation on international standards, development and funding in cyberspace to improve and prove the security of networks, protocols, hardware and software.

3. Deescalation of cyber capabilities and activities. These exercises can be expressed in many ways such as 'cyber-free days' where nations show their good intentions by withholding operations in good faith.

4. International investment, development, data sharing and standardization of forensics capabilities to squeeze the attribution problem. This may be done in lockstep with protocol development.

But at its root there are three reasons nations hack one another: intelligence, intellectual property, sabotage.

Whatever deterrents and legal frameworks are in place will need to be as or more compelling than the motivations for cyberactivity. Whatever can be done to limit what can be gained by intelligence, sabotage and IP theft will in turn limit cyber activity. So a fifth item would be to reexamine and double down on the international peace keeping frameworks that discourage the listed above.

Stop using Baidu for one.

Decentralize the web. Much harder to DDoS it this way and also harder to censor it.