Tuesday, December 09, 2014

Waltzing to Skynet: Automated Terrain and Maneuver in Cyber Warfare


In real-world warfare, troops and tanks maneuver to take advantage of the terrain. In the looking-glass world of cyberspace, however, “maneuver” may mean changing the terrain itself. If the enemy’s invading your country, you can dig a trench or blow a bridge, but otherwise you go to war with the landscape you have.

If the enemy’s invading your network, however, you can rebuild it in an eyeblink to block their avenue of attack — provided you know how they’re getting in. You can reject incoming data from suspicious IP addresses, for example, or disable your users’ ability to download files (a common Trojan Horse), or, in the worst case, shut everything down before too much damage is done.

There are lots of options — too many, in fact, for the human brain to track of all of them, let alone decide which one is best, the Pentagon’s chief cybersecurity officer said Thursday. Think of all the different settings you have on whatever device you’re using to read this article. It’s not just about the obvious options like whether you accept cookies and block pop-ups. It’s not even the configuration of your firewall (you do have a firewall, don’t you?). It’s every program that has can take data from the Internet. Think of trying to choose the right settings across all those programs — keeping in mind how they all interact! — to stop a specific attack. Then do it again the next day when a new threat shows up. Now multiply that by thousands of computers interacting in a global network.

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