{"id":30181,"date":"2022-02-14T11:11:25","date_gmt":"2022-02-14T11:11:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/c4isrnet\/uncategorized\/2022\/02\/14\/tripwire-for-real-war-cybers-fuzzy-rules-of-engagement\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T10:30:59","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T10:30:59","slug":"tripwire-for-real-war-cybers-fuzzy-rules-of-engagement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/c4isrnet\/cyber\/2022\/02\/14\/tripwire-for-real-war-cybers-fuzzy-rules-of-engagement\/","title":{"rendered":"Tripwire for real war? Cyber\u2019s fuzzy rules of engagement"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

President Joe Biden couldn\u2019t have been more blunt about the risks of cyberattacks spinning out of control. \u201cIf we end up in a war, a real shooting war with a major power, it\u2019s going to be as a consequence of a cyber breach of great consequence,\u201d <\/a>he told his intelligence brain trust in July.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now tensions are soaring over Ukraine with Western officials warning about the danger of Russia launching damaging cyberattacks against Ukraine\u2019s NATO allies. While no one is suggesting that could lead to a full-blown war between nuclear-armed rivals, the risk of escalation is serious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The danger is in the uncertainty about what crosses a digital red line. Cyberattacks, including those that cripple critical infrastructure with ransomware, have been on the rise for years and often go unpunished. It\u2019s unclear how grave a malicious cyber operation by a state actor would have to be to cross the threshold to an act of war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe rules are fuzzy,\u201d said Max Smeets, director of the European Cyber Conflict Research Initiative. \u201cIt\u2019s not clear what is allowed, what isn\u2019t allowed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The United States and other NATO members have threatened crippling sanctions against Russia if it sends troops into Ukraine. Less clear is whether such sanctions, whose secondary effects could also hurt Europe, would be imposed if Russia were to seriously damage Ukrainian critical infrastructure \u2014 power, telecommunications, finance, railways \u2014 with cyberattacks in lieu of invading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And if the West were to respond harshly to Russian aggression, Moscow could retaliate against NATO nations in cyberspace with an intensity and on a scale previously unseen. A major cyberattack on U.S. targets would almost certainly unleash a muscular response. But what of lesser cyberattacks? Or if Russian President Vladimir Putin restricted them to a NATO member in Europe?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Under Article 5 of the organization\u2019s treaty, an attack on any of its 30 members is considered an attack on all. But unclear is what it would take to unleash full-scale cyber retaliation. Or how bad an attack would have to be to trigger retaliation from NATO\u2019s most potent cyber military forces, led by the U.S. and Britain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cyberspace is exceptionally unruly. No arms control treaties exist to put guard rails on state-backed hacking, which is often shielded by plausible deniability as it\u2019s often difficult to quickly attribute cyberattacks and intelligence-gathering intrusions. The technology is cheap and criminals can act as proxies, further muddying attribution. Freelancers and hacktivists compound the problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2015, the major powers and others agreed on a set of 11 voluntary norms<\/a> of international cyber behavior at the United Nations. But they are routinely ignored. Russia helped craft them only to knock Ukraine\u2019s power grid offline that winter and set in motion its hack-and-leak operation to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hacking is now a core component of great power conflict. In 2016, NATO formally designated cyberspace a \u201cdomain\u201d of conflict, alongside land, sea and air.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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dark grey keyboard red enter button target crosshair<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Nowhere has the militarization of cyberspace been more clear than in Putin\u2019s bid to return Ukraine to Moscow\u2019s orbit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To Serhii Demediuk, the No. 2 official on Ukraine\u2019s National Security and Defense Council, a noisy cyberattack last month was \u201cpart of a full-scale Russian operation directed at destabilizing the situation in Ukraine, aimed at exploding our Euro-Atlantic integration and seizing power.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The attack damaged servers at the State Emergency Service and at the Motor Transport Insurance Bureau with a malicious \u201cwiper\u201d cloaked as ransomware. The damage proved minimal, but a message posted simultaneously on dozens of defaced government websites said: \u201cBe afraid and expect the worst.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such attacks are apt to continue as Putin tries to \u201cdegrade\u201d and \u201cdelegitimize\u201d trust in Ukrainian institutions, the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said in a blog <\/a>on Russian military cyber wreckage in the former Soviet republic: Winter attacks on the power grid in 2015 and 2016 were followed by NotPetya, which exacted more than $10 billion in damage globally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Michele Markoff, the U.S. State Department\u2019s deputy coordinator for cyber issues, thinks \u201cmuscular diplomacy\u201d is the only way to end such \u201cimmoral, unethical and destabilizing behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But how? Unlike nuclear arms, cyberweapons can\u2019t easily be quantified, verified and limited in treaties. Nor are violators apt to be held accountable in the United Nations, not with Russia and China wielding veto power on its Security Council.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve wallowed kind of in a quagmire for years now on making transgressors accountable,\u201d said Duncan Hollis, a Temple Law professor and former State Department legal adviser.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Members endorsed in May an update to the 2015 U.N. norm<\/a> s that further delineates <\/a>what should be out of bounds: including hospitals, energy, water and sanitation, education and financial services. That has hardly deterred Russian-speaking ransomware crooks, <\/a>who are at the very least tolerated by the Kremlin. Nor have U.S. indictments of Russian and Chinese state hackers and the blacklisting of tech companies accused of aiding them <\/a>helped much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Under a new policy NATO adopted last year after U.S lobbying,<\/a> an accumulation of lower-level cyberattacks \u2014 far below, say, blacking out the U.S. East Coast \u2014 could be enough to trigger Article 5. But NATO is vague on what a tipping point might be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NATO\u2019s doctrinal shift followed a pair of seismic cyberespionage shocks \u2014 the highly targeted 2020 SolarWinds supply chain hack by Russia that badly rattled Washington and the reckless March 2021 Microsoft Exchange hack attributed to Chinese state security that set off a criminal hacking free-for-all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A cluster of wholesale data pilfering in the mid-2010s attributed to China \u2014 from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, United Airlines, Marriott hotels and the health insurer Anthem \u2014 inflicted a deep national security wound. And U.S. officials have worried for more than a decade about rivals \u2014 Russia especially \u2014 quietly \u201cpre-positioning\u201d enough malware <\/a>in U.S. critical infrastructure including the energy sector <\/a>to cause considerable chaos in an armed conflict.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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FILE – The sign outside the National Security Administration (NSA) campus where U.S. Cyber Command is located in Fort Meade, Md., June 6, 2013. Tensions are soaring over Ukraine with Western officials warning about the danger of Russia launching major cyberattacks against its NATO allies. (AP Photo\/Patrick Semansky, File)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In response, U.S. Cyber Command developed a strategy<\/a> in 2018 it calls \u201cpersistent engagement\u201d to counter rivals who \u201coperate continuously below the threshold of armed conflict to weaken institutions and gain strategic advantages.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The aim: deny foes the chance to breach U.S. systems by operating \u201cacross the interconnected battlespace, globally, as close as possible to adversaries,\u201d Cybercom commander Gen. Paul Nakasone wrote<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That has sometimes meant penetrating not just adversaries\u2019 networks but also those of allies \u2014 without asking permission, said Smeets, the European cyber conflict analyst.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Disinformation campaigns have also muddied the definition of a \u201ccyber threat.\u201d No longer do they merely encompass malware like NotPetya or the the Stuxnet virus that wrecked Iranian nuclear centrifuges, an operation widely attributed to the U.S. and Israel and discovered in 2010.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the 2018 U.S. midterm elections, Cybercom temporarily knocked offline a key Russian disinformation mill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most major powers have the equivalent of a U.S. Cyber Command for both offense and defense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also active are terrorists, criminals working as state proxies, begrudged freelancers<\/a> and hacktivists like the Cyber Partisans of Belarus.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hollis compares the current messy cyber moment to the early 19th century when U.S. and European navies were so small they often relied on privateers \u2014 we know them now as pirates\u2014 for high-seas dirty work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The U.S. and other NATO partners are, meantime, helping Ukraine stand up a separate cyber military unit, said Demediuk, the Ukrainian security official. Since Russia seized Crimea in 2014, NATO has closely and systematically coordinating cyber actions with Ukraine, including joint missions, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In November, Ukraine exposed an eight-year espionage operation by agents of Russia\u2019s FSB in Crimea involving more than 5,000 attempted hacks. The main goal: to gain control over critical infrastructure, including power plants, heating and water supply systems, Ukraine\u2019s state news agency said.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This month, Microsoft said<\/a> the operation, dubbed Armageddon, persists with attempts to penetrate Ukraine\u2019s military, judiciary and law enforcement. Microsoft detected no damage, but that doesn\u2019t mean Russian cyber operators haven\u2019t gained undetected footholds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s where hackers hide until they are ready to pounce.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Associated Press writer Yuras Karmanau in Kyiv, Ukraine, contributed to this report.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The danger is in the uncertainty about what crosses a digital red line.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":30393,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":10,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[10,106,29,32],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3189],"class_list":["post-30181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cyber","category-daily-brief","category-home","category-newsletters"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"UOZPEL4XUBDZRCUDONTLZZ65ZQ","arc_canonical_url":"\/news\/pentagon-congress\/2022\/02\/14\/tripwire-for-real-war-cybers-fuzzy-rules-of-engagement\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\nTripwire for real war? 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