With great responsibility comes great power.

["Dave Aitel" <dave.aitel () gmail com>]

Right now we're in the midst of some sort of weird publicity push from the
US Military regarding cyberwar, which started before the Estonians got
DDoSed last week. Most of the articles point out how China is beefing up
their forces with frankly inane titles such as "China Cyberware Alert!":

http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/internet/06/13/china.cyberspace.reut/index.html
http://www.defensetech.org/archives/003548.html
There's a NYT article today too, but they make it impossible to link to
them.

In March, Stratfor had an article about it as well:
http://www.stratfor.com/products/premium/read_article.php?id=286304
They concluded:
"""
Ultimately, much about cyberwarfare efforts will remain classified.
Cartwright's comments are more illustrative of a military that is accustomed
to dominating the battle space preparing for a new offensive in cyberspace.
STRATCOM's staff judge advocate -- the command's legal representative --
likely has advised Cartwright that his efforts to bring offensive
cyberwarfare measures to bear have reached the point at which they require
congressional oversight and approval -- the only real motivation for
Cartwright to share his command's efforts with the public.
"""

If you listen to John Arquilla, of the Naval Postgraduate school, he also
mentions China first as the leading integrator of cyberwarfare into their
overall strategy [1]. Oddly he believes there's only a few dozen master
hackers in the world, a number I think is far too small, but perhaps we have
different definitions or just a different circle of friends. His estimate is
that half of the master hackers are American, a number I would say is
irrelevant. You can't judge the length of a sword by the sharpness of the
point.

My opinion is that any cyberwar waged against the United States would be
one-sided. As Admiral Yamamoto learned the hard way[2], one of the US
Military's defining characteristics is extensive propaganda efforts to get
the opponent to underestimate them. But as a somewhat useful metric, you can
fit the attendees of all the non-US information security conferences each
month into any one US conference.

-dave

[1] http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/podcast.aspx?id=30 - I started
listening to this sure he would be full of it, but it's really quite good.
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoroku_Yamamoto and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoroku_Yamamoto%27s_sleeping_giant_quote

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