US is like ‘Bambi walking in the woods’ when it comes to all-out cyberattack

If you're worried about terrorism, here's a bigger threat to lose sleep over: an all-out cyberattack.

Suddenly, the electricity goes out at the office. Mobile phone networks and the internet have also gone black, along with subways and trains.

The roads are jammed because traffic lights aren’t working. Credit cards are now just worthless bits of plastic, and ATMs are nothing but hunks of metal. Petrol stations can’t pump fuel.

Banks have lost records of depositors’ accounts. Dam floodgates mysteriously open. Water and sewage treatment plants stop working.

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People can’t reach loved ones. Phone systems are down, so 911 is useless. Looters roam the streets. Food and water soon run out in the cities.

And that’s just the first week.

Security experts have nightmares like that. Countries like Russia and China have implanted malicious software in the American electrical grid, nuclear power plants and water systems to have the capacity to mount such attacks – and we have done the same to them. Indeed, the US prepared an extensive plan, Nitro Zeus, to unplug Iran through cyberattacks. But in the end we never implemented it.

International security

These are some of the issues explored in an important – and deeply sobering – new book about cyberwarfare, The Perfect Weapon, by my colleague David Sanger. I've known Sanger since we joined our college newspaper together at the beginning of freshman year, and he has spent the decades since exploring the intersections of technology and international security – and trying to alert us to our vulnerabilities.

The risks aren’t just of a cyber-Pearl Harbor but also of a full spectrum of attacks.

The Russian hack of Democratic emails should have been a wake-up call. A senior FBI official told Sanger: “These DNC [Democratic National Convention] guys were like Bambi walking in the woods, surrounded by hunters. They had zero chance of surviving an attack. Zero.”

Even after the attacks, we didn’t learn, and much of the US is still like Bambi. The Russian hack of the US elections in 2016 should have us on our toes for 2018, but the Trump administration has done little to prepare to fight off new hacking.

Sanger describes a Russian cyberattack on the Ukrainian electrical grid shortly before Christmas 2015. Operators of the grid were bewildered: nothing they clicked on their computers had any effect, and cursors dashed across their screens to disconnect circuits and delete backup systems.

Finally, the hackers disconnected the backup electrical system, so that the operators in the control room were literally in the dark.

Hackers are increasingly brazen. When Russian hackers infiltrated US state department and White House computer systems in 2014, National Security Agency (NSA) specialists tried to uproot them – and the hackers fought back. "It was basically hand-to-hand combat in a network," Rick Ledgett, a senior NSA official, told Sanger.

Cyber is the “perfect weapon”, in Sanger’s formulation, because attackers typically get off scot-free.

If North Korea had responded to the Sony Pictures movie, The Interview, by blowing up cinemas, it might have faced a strong response. Instead, it hacked into Sony's system, destroyed computers and paralysed the company.

Exposing

In both the Sony and Democratic Party attacks, the hackers enlisted the American news media to magnify the damage; we in the media were used, and we should reflect on that.

Later, North Korean hackers pilfered $81 million from the Bangladesh Central Bank (they might have gotten away with almost $1 billion, but someone misspelled “foundation”). For all this, North Korea faced no significant punishment.

Sanger writes that American officials debated whether to punish Vladimir Putin for his hacks by exposing his links to oligarchs, or even by making some of his money disappear. But Barack Obama baulked, fearful of what Putin might do next, and Donald Trump has also dithered.

General Paul Nakasone, head of the US Cyber Command, was asked in his confirmation hearings this year what our adversaries think will happen if they attack us in cyberspace. "They do not think much will happen," he replied. "They don't fear us."

As Sanger writes: “Deterrence is not working in the cyber realm.” Why wouldn’t Putin interfere in our 2018 midterms since we’re both vulnerable and not serious about responding?

We need to establish a cost to cyberattacks and help establish norms for cyber – a Geneva Convention for hacking. The problem is that the US also uses cyberwarfare (to destroy Iranian centrifuges and, apparently, North Korean missiles), and we don’t want to constrain ourselves.

Meanwhile, we are becoming ever more vulnerable, partly because daily life is becoming more dependent on computers, and partly because cyber-offence is far ahead of cyber-defence. The US started with a huge advantage, but Russia and China have nearly caught up, and Iran and North Korea don’t seem far behind.

In the 1990s, we were too complacent about the risks of terrorism; it took the Twin Towers collapsing to galvanise us. In the world of cyberspace, we’re still too complacent: let’s stop playing Bambi!

– New York Times