Cyber war threats should be debated openly: McAfee

James Riley
Tuesday, 17 November 2009 16:19

Business IT - Security

US computer security giant McAfee says discussion about cyber warfare and critical infrastructure protection should be taken from behind the closed doors of security, intelligence and defence agencies and moved into the open.

The more open the policy-making discussion, the better chance the private sector would have to protect the nation’s information infrastructure, it said.

In its fifth annual Virtual Criminology Report, McAfee's primary message were that cyber warfare is real, that United States, Israel, France, China and Russia are all 'cyberarmed' and that politically motivated cyber attacks would become increasingly commonplace.

McAfee says too much of the debate about policies to deal with cyber war and vulnerabilities was "happening behind closed doors."

"Since governments, corporations and private citizens all have a stake in the future of the Internet, it is time to open a global dialogue on how to manage this new form of conflict," it said.

The report says part of the issue with cyber warfare trends was that no commonly accepted definition for cyber war existed – and that much of the activity in the space might not be considered openly hostile.

The Attorney-General's department participated in the McAfee study, with first assistant secretary Mike Rothery quoted saying: "If you were a half clever adversary, you probably wouldn't perpetrate an attack that everyone agrees is cyber warfare; you would play in the shades of grey."

Rothery, who heads the AG's National Security Resilience Policy Division, runs the shadowy Trusted Information Sharing Network for Critical Infrastructure Protection (TISN), an information sharing network of private sector critical infrastructure owners – like telco's and electrical utilities – and security agencies and government departments.

He has run counter-terrorism at AG's, and has led its Critical Infrastructure Protection Branch.

The report says that in any conflict between nation-states, private sector-held critical infrastructure - such as the electrical grid, banking and finance, and oil and gas sectors – are vulnerable to attack. Further, there was evidence to suggest that the ground work was already being done by some countries to identify specific vulnerabilities in these networks.

McAfee for the first time provides a model to define cyberwar, identifies the countries involved in developing cyberoffenses and cyberdefenses, dissects examples of politically-motivated cyberattacks and reveals how the private sector will get caught in the crossfire.

"Over the next 20 to 30 years, cyberattacks will increasingly become a component of war," former US National Security Agency deputy director William Crowell said.

"What I can’t foresee is whether networks will be so pervasive and unprotected that cyber war operations will stand alone."