Cyber Warfare Quotes

Why would you want to kidnap Herr Schiller’s grandson?” Jansch looked at his boss. He arched his eyebrows. “I wouldn’t.” “I know you wouldn’t. But amuse me, please.” Jansch studied the car for a moment. “Leverage,” he said eventually.

We worried for decades about WMDs – Weapons of Mass Destruction. Now it is time to worry about a new kind of WMDs – Weapons of Mass Disruption.

Why did I decide to write cyber thrillers? Because we've gone from the Cold War to the Code War.

Nuclear weapons made global warfare of the twentieth century variety too costly to conduct. But cyber weapons make far more likely an era of nearly permanent or persistent conflict that seeks to degrade rather than destroy enemies, and to do so at a distance, behind cover of anonymity, with few if any human assets at risk. In a hundred years we may have gone from the war to end all wars to the war that never ends.

It was the storm that would forever change the course of human destiny.

The 2016 cyberattack was not just another case of simple Kompromat - meddling in the political affairs of a satellite nation or an individual dissenter. It was a direct attempt to hijack and derail the traditional processes and norms that held the United States together for more than 240 years. The attempt was even more brazen due to the apparent belief that Putin assumed that he and his oligarchy could charm, groom and select a candidate, then with the right amount of cybercrime and enough organized propaganda they could actually choose a president of the United States to do their bidding.

They told you that you were safe. They told you lies. You are weak and defeated. For the price of one helicopter, we have brought you to your knees.

The nations, of course, that are most at risk of a destructive digital attack are the ones with the greatest connectivity. Marcus Ranum, one of the early innovators of the computer firewall, called Stuxnet 'a stone thrown by people who live in a glass house'.

Cyberwar, in fact, is part of the evolution of conventional warfare, which itself is linked to broader social and political change. It is no longer easy to imagine a confrontation that does not include some element of cyber-activity, such as surveillance or sabotage.

However, we should not confuse ability with motivation. Though cyber warfare introduces new means of destruction, it doesn’t necessarily add new incentives to use them. Over the last seventy years humankind has broken not only the Law of the Jungle, but also the Chekhov Law. Anton Chekhov famously said that a gun appearing in the first act of a play will inevitably be fired in the third. Throughout history, if kings and emperors acquired some new weapon, sooner or later they were tempted to use it. Since 1945, however, humankind has learned to resist this temptation. The gun that appeared in the first act of the Cold War was never fired. By now we are accustomed to living in a world full of undropped bombs and unlaunched missiles, and have become experts in breaking both the Law of the Jungle and the Chekhov Law.

Our greater beastliness lies not in a penchant for brute force,but in our greater corruption, nihilism, and decadence; in our servitude to the overwhelming systems we create; in the sociopathic rationalism we adopt to master natural forces and to compete with the machines we build;and in the scientistic idolatry that co-opts the religious impulse. Of course the ancients resorted more to brute force: they lacked the infrastructure to punish their enemies and victims in a safer, more sophisticated fashion, with advanced legal regimes and mass-produced, maximum security prisons; with engineered propaganda for social conditioning; and with economic, cyber, and drone warfare. We channel our aggression with more sophisticated instruments, but the use of those instruments doesn’t ennoble us.

CYBERPOWER is now a fundamental fact of global life. In political, economic, and military affairs, information and information technology provide and support crucial elements of operational activities. U.S. national security efforts have begun to incorporate cyber into strategic calculations. Those efforts, however, are only a beginning. The critical conclusion...is that the United States must create an effective national and international strategic framework for the development and use of cyber as part of an overall national security strategy. Such a strategic framework will have both structural and geopolitical elements. Structural activities will focus on those parts of cyber that enhance capabilities for use in general. Those categories include heightened security, expanded development of research and human capital, improved governance, and more effective organization. Geopolitical activities will focus on more traditional national security and defense efforts. Included in this group are sophisticated development of network-centric operations; appropriate integrated planning of computer network attack capabilities; establishment of deterrence doctrine that incorporates cyber; expansion of effective cyber influence capabilities; carefully planned incorporation of cyber into military planning (particularly stability operations); establishment of appropriate doctrine, education, and training regarding cyber by the Services and nonmilitary elements so that cyber can be used effectively in a joint and/or multinational context; and generation of all those efforts at an international level, since cyber is inherently international and cannot be most effectively accomplished without international partners.

Benedict noted. “How ironic that the first acknowledged military use of cyber warfare is ostensibly to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. A new age of mass destruction will begin in an effort to close a chapter from the first age of mass destruction.

To analyse cyber-security, we need to augment our current research to include monitoring at the centre, and this too needs to dive deep into the packet structure. As

Republican Arizona congressman Paul Gosar sent Meadows several texts between November and December 2020 warning about “dead voters” and Dominion, the voting machines destined to become a lightning rod in the months to come. (It was a line of inquiry that even Meadows repeatedly indicated he doubted in emails to other associates.) One of Gosar’s texts included a link to a movie about “cyber warfare” and voting machines from an anti-vaccine conspiracy blog called Some Bitch Told Me. Republicans in Washington mined briefings from very dubious sources.

Our points of vulnerable access are greater than in all of previous human history, yet we have barely begun to focus on the actual danger that cyber warfare presents to our national infrastructure. Past experience in preparing for the unexpected teaches us that, more often than not, we get it wrong. It also teaches that there is value in the act of searching for answers. Acknowledging ignorance is often the first step toward finding a solution. The next step entails identifying the problem. Here it is: for the first time in the history of warfare, governments need to worry about force projection by individual laptop. Those charged with restoring the nation after such an attack will have to come to terms with the notion that the Internet, among its many, many virtues, is also a weapon of mass destruction.

Cheap to produce and easy to disseminate, germs, chemicals, and cyber-viruses are particularly well-suited for the weak to use against the strong.

If the First Gulf War made PLA military planners pay close attention to American battle prowess, the appearance in Beijing in 1999 of a volume called Unrestricted Warfare returned the favor. This book gave Pentagon strategists an alarming window into Chinese thinking about the nature of their engagement with the Western world, particularly the United States. The authors were two senior PLA colonels from China’s rising military elite, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, whose work obviously had official sanction.19 Qiao and Wang argued that China should use all means, armed and unarmed, military and nonmilitary, and lethal and nonlethal, to compel the enemy to accept its interests.

The lecturer’s name was Dr. Shen Weiguang, and although he’s now regarded as the founding sage of Chinese information warfare theory, his views were then on the fringe in strategic circles in the Middle Kingdom. “Virus-infected microchips can be put in weapon systems,” he pointed out. “An arms manufacturer can be asked to write a virus into software, or a biological weapon can be embedded into the computer system of an enemy nation and then activated as needed. . . . Preparation for a military invasion can include hiding self-destructing microchips in systems designed for export.” Tactics like these, he said, could have profound strategic implications if carried out carefully and systematically. They could “destroy the enemy’s political, economic, and military information infrastructures, and, perhaps, even the information infrastructure for all of society.” If China could do that, Shen said, it could achieve the greatest of all strategic military objectives: It could “destroy the enemy’s will to launch a war or wage a war.

The agents of imperial demise would certainly be backed up by military power—the Chinese have never wavered in that view—but the agents would be many and varied: economic, legal, public relations—and electronic sabotage. The success of George Soros’s then recent speculative attack on the currencies of several East Asian nations impressed but appalled the Chinese (who have pegged their own currency to the dollar in part to discourage such tactics). Soros and his traders had driven down the value of these currencies, forcing them into line with their true worth! But that point was lost on Qiao and Wang, as it was lost on noncapitalists (i.e., most people) around the world, who saw only economic chaos in Asia created by Western capitalists. To the authors of Unrestricted Warfare, these attacks were a form of economic terrorism on par with bin Laden’s bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa, Aum Shinrikyo’s sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway, and the depredations of malicious hackers on the Internet. They “represent semi-warfare, quasi-warfare, and sub-warfare, that is, the embryonic form of another kind of warfare.” Such warfare knows no boundaries, and against it, borders have no meaning.

Between these amorphous hacker groups and the PLA’s network professionals lies a murky middle layer whose shape, not surprisingly, is indistinct, but whose mission—information warfare (IW)—is not. In 1998 the PRC launched what may have been its first experiment with a cybermilitia: a forty-person unit in a state-owned enterprise in Datong City, Shanxi Province, which had a rich talent pool drawn from some twenty universities, institutes, and companies.48 Militias are neither official government cadres nor freelance hackers. They operate in ambiguous space, connected to one or another government office by a loose string. A twitch of a government finger tightens the string, either to restrain or direct an operation. The PLA has been actively creating IW militias since about 2002, recruiting from universities, research institutes, and commercial IT companies, especially telecom firms. Some accounts call these cadres an “active reserve,” comprising eight million network operators under direct state control.

Without any question, no matter what side of the aisle one sits on, the simple fact is that the United States was attacked by Russian cyber commandos deployed by Vladimir Putin and organized by his intelligence apparatus, the FSB and GRU. It was a serious act of political warfare.

After the fall of the Soviet Union the KGB became known as the FSB. In the last ten years Russian intelligence melded all of its offensive techniques to create a new kind of war: Hybrid Warfare—a melange of hostile cyber, political, and psychological operations in support of their national objectives, whether during peacetime or in open war. It is now standard operating procedure.

With that said, Operation LUCKY-7 had its cut-out. The FSB’s Information Warfare Management Cell (IWMC) would create a false flag source to feed Assange the data taken from the DNC and any subsequent hacks through Guccifer 2.0. Assange was desperate to be relevant and the IWMC was going to create a new era where his own hatreds and agenda could be skillfully manipulated by the FSB’s active measures officers, while the cyber teams would keep him well fed. Assange was primed to do LUCKY-7’s bidding and now only needed the data they had stolen. WikiLeaks was now a wholly owned subsidiary of the FSB and essentially the cyber equivalent of a Laundromat, a Russian laundry —ready to clean and give a white appearance to the dirt.

For some politics has become a battle ground that allows them to vent their frustrations, while at the same time hide behind the anonymity of the social media. For others it has become a weapon to overwhelm their opponents by the weight of the number of comments sent to the originator of the blog or article. Fair or not, this method of cyber warfare works and could possibly change the course of history. A continuance of this cyber activity is still not totally understood by most bloggers, but certainly can be threatening and intimidating. Recently we have witnessed where foreign countries become involved in the attempt to rig elections by altering the mind set of those receiving overwhelming amounts of mostly altered news. This is certainly presently true in France. In Pakistan a student was murdered by his fellow students, simply because he had a difference of opinion. Art has become a victim of this form of attack, being accused of being a financial drain on the country’s economy whereas it, in all of its forms, is a stabilizer of civilization. Helping and feeding those less fortunate then ourselves also stabilizes a good society. On the opposite side of this topic a destabilizing activity is war, which cost us much more, however it does get us to alter our focus. It is the threat of nuclear annihilation that really gets our attention and may even eventually offer job opportunities to the survivors. I feel certain that the opposing sides of these issues are already marshaling their forces and stand fast to their beliefs. You would think that funding for the arts should be non-political, however I have found it to be a hot button issue, whereas going to war is accepted by an overwhelming majority of people, even before we attempt peaceful diplomatic negotiations. Building a wall separating us from Mexico is a great idea that is embraced by many who still believe that Mexico will eventually pay for it, but our “Affordable Health Care” must be thrown out! What will give our people more bang for the buck? An improved health care Bill or a Beautiful Wall? I’ve heard that Medicare and Social Security are things we can no longer afford, but it’s the same people who still believe that we can afford a nuclear war. These are issues that we can and should address, however I’ll just get back to my books and deal with the pro or anti Castro activists, or neo-Nazis, or whoever else wants to make a political statement. My next book “Seawater One….” will have some sex in it…. Perhaps we can all agree that, that’s a good thing or perhaps not.

called counter command-control warfare: just knowing that you’d been hacked, regardless of its tangible effects, was disorienting, disrupting. Meanwhile,

Iran surely understands that it cannot hope to wage a nuclear war with the United States and win, but Iran will continue pursuing its strategic interests by other means: terrorism, the use of surrogates, and, increasingly, cyber warfare.

We have come to know how nuclear weapons can destroy societies and human civilization. We have not yet begun to understand how cyber warfare might destroy our way of life,” Benedict noted. “How ironic that the first acknowledged military use of cyber warfare is ostensibly to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.

Russia has perfected political warfare by using cyber assets to personally attack and neutralize political opponents. They call it Kompromat. They hack into computers or phones to gather intelligence, expose this intelligence (or false data they manufacture out of whole cloth) through the media to create scandal, and thereby knock an opponent or nation out of the game. Russia has attacked Estonia, the Ukraine, and Western nations using just these cyberwarfare methods. At some point Russia apparently decided to apply these tactics against the United States and so American democracy itself was hacked.

Cops often saw cybercrime as a benign act that didn’t really hurt anyone. There was nothing benign in stealing someone’s identity or destroying their credit rating. There was nothing benign in controlling the world’s power grids, banking systems, or economies. Control cyber-technology and you controlled the flow of information for most of the world’s population. And cyber-warfare had already begun. Just ask the Iranians about Stuxnet, or Estonia, Ukraine and Georgia about pissing off the Russians.

We will never build resilience to cyberattacks—or foreign disinformation campaigns, for that matter—without good policy and nationwide awareness of cyber threats. We should make cybersecurity and media literacy a core part of American curriculum. Too many cyberattacks rely on vulnerable American systems, running on software that is not up-to-date or which has not been patched. This is, in large part, an education problem. The same goes for information warfare. Americans are being coopted by disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories because Americans lack the tools to spot influence operations, foreign and domestic, in real time.

Vault 7 --- A series of documents published by WikiLeaks in 2017 that detail the capabilities of the CIA to perform electronic surveillance and cyber warfare. The files, dated from 2013–2016, include

Weaponized social media is the new WMD, changing cyber warfare in a frightening new way; spawning fiction to cloud the facts.

the frustration was knowing that the FBI’s silence had helped Putin succeed and that more exposure could have given the American people the information they needed. While Brennan and Reid had their hair on fire and Comey was dragging his feet, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell was actively playing defense for Trump and the Russians. We know now that even after he was fully briefed by the CIA, McConnell rejected the intelligence and warned the Obama administration that if it made any attempt to inform the public, he would attack it for playing politics. I can’t think of a more shameful example of a national leader so blatantly putting partisanship over national security. McConnell knew better, but he did it anyway. I know some former Obama administration officials have regrets about how this all unfolded. Former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson told the House Intelligence Committee in June 2017 that the administration didn’t take a more aggressive public stance because it was concerned about reinforcing Trump’s complaints that the election was “rigged” and being “perceived as taking sides in the election.” Former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, whom I’d come to trust and value when we worked together in President Obama’s first term, told the Washington Post that the Obama administration was focused on a traditional cyber threat, while “the Russians were playing this much bigger game” of multifaceted information warfare

Cyber warfare is as much about psychological strategy as technical prowess.

Typologies already exist for offensive network activities. US doctrine divides by purpose; OCOs may disrupt, destroy, degrade, deny, or ma-nipulate their targets.17 This is a useful distinction when attempting to distinguish between potential impacts, but purposes are less compelling when used to create overarching categories for the operations themselves.