The West’s defensive cyber skills are probably inadequate to face the growing threat from China and North Korea, and it is almost as frightening that no one really knows how secure the US and European military sites will be in the face of a future cyber war. To date most of the action has been against relatively soft commercial targets in the mass hacking and theft of tonnes of corporate and patent information for the benefit of Chinese industry, while the military world has not been tested.
In the latest incident, Sony has cancelled the release of its comedy film, The Interview, which makes fun of North Korea’s third generation despot, Kim Jong-un, after its systems were hacked by the North Koreans who threatened further action if the film went ahead. US President Barack Obama criticised Sony’s action, saying that the US should not allow “some dictator someplace to start imposing censorship”, but unfortunately, the US government’s defensive cyber skills are in no position to guarantee protection for Sony.
The real danger that this apparently ludicrous episode highlights how advanced China and North Korea have become in their cyber skills, and how weak the West may be in its ability to counter such attacks. These actions can be a genuine threat to the security of any country in the world. The Iranians still talk of the Stuxnet worm which attacked their nuclear installations in 2010 and disabled about a fifth of their capacity. The US has never claimed responsibility for this attack, but it is hard to see where else it might have come from. The same North Korean skills that downloaded 10 terabytes without the host being aware of it, could be used against military and government sites. A real problem is that American and European programme developers are required to obey laws against data theft and hacking. This means that their organisations have not developed the same effective offensive cyber skills as the North Koreans or Chinese, which they need to do in order to develop counter measures. And this is despite the recognition by both American and European armed forces that the cyber world is a real dimension for conflict.
