No matter how you look at it, the United States and China are in some form of cybersecurity competition. Though attributing specific activities to the Chinese government or other groups or individuals in China is difficult, it is increasingly disingenuous to maintain that it’s unclear whether widespread hacking originating in China is happening.
So, following on the notion that Chinese cybersecurity is “crowdsourced” while U.S. efforts emanate from a creaking bureaucracy (h/t Evan Osnos), I wrote a little essay yesterday for Motherboard.tv on what I’m cutely calling an asymmetric Cold War.
The Cold War parallel is never far below the surface, but the dilemma for targets of attacks is how to face the “Adversary.” As a practical matter, creating unbreakable security is impossible; you can only make things better. But practical concerns make it hard to levy direct, public pressure on governments in China, Russia, and other hacker-heavy states. The result is something like asymmetrical cold war, with no mutually assured destruction and with destruction defined in terms of potential attacks during a hot war, or loss of financially valuable intellectual property. And there’s a lot of it, experts fear. Says one Senate staffer: “But terrorism is not the best analogy here. Who could have imagined that people would have flown airplanes into buildings?The difference with cyber is there are people trying to fly planes into buildings every day now.” [full text]
Perhaps invoking the Cold War would tend to exaggerate the scale of things, but, then again, perhaps not. After all, I lack hacking skills and security clearance. What do I know?
