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War Room

Opinion | The Cyber Apocalypse Never Came. Here’s What We Got Instead.

Over the past decade, cyber warfare has changed in ways the experts didn’t see coming.

IMAGE: General view at the Kaspersky Transparency Summit, where experts and leaders of the global ICT industry gathered to debated how to ensure trust in, and assurance for their products in the current cybersecurity landscape. | Adrian Bretscher/Kapersky Lab via Getty Images

Opinion by JACQUELYN SCHNEIDER

07/27/2021 04:30 AM EDT

 

Blogger Intro: Obviously from long-time industry insider > Jacquelyn Schneider is a Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution. She is a non-resident fellow at the Naval War College's Cyber and Innovation Policy Institute and was previously a senior policy adviser to the Cyberspace Solarium Commission

"Even for those of us who watch cyber warfare closely, the seeming barrage of cyber-related headlines in 2021 has felt remarkable 

> This spring, the Biden administration sanctioned Russia for last year’s breach of network software firm SolarWinds, which allowed Russian hackers to access major U.S. government agencies and over 18,000 companies.

> A few months later, Russian cyber attacks were back in the news, with purported Russian criminals extorting oil distributor Colonial Pipeline and meatpacking firm JBS for millions of dollars in ransomware payouts.

> NOTE The keyword customers: attacks have become so widespread that exhausted cyber security firms are turning away desperate customers.

> Meanwhile, last week, the United States, NATO and the EU pointed the finger at China for a massive breach of a Microsoft exchange server, propagated by cyber mercenaries hired by the Chinese Ministry of State Security. The countries’ joint statement is all the more remarkable given both NATO and the EU’s unwillingness to brand China an “adversary.”

> And on the same day, researchers revealed a multi-state effort to hack and monitor presidents, monarchs, journalists and more, using spyware created not by the Russian government, China’s security apparatus or the National Security Agency—but by a private Israeli company called the NSO Group. . .

So what is going on in cyberspace, and did anyone see this coming? . .

What we got was neither the unbridled promise of digital cooperation nor a fiery cyber apocalypse. Instead, today’s cyber reality seems simultaneously less scary and more of a hot mess—a series of more frequent, less consequential attacks that add up not to a massive Hollywood disaster but rather to a vaguer sense of vulnerability. This can make it hard to understand what’s going on and how bad it really is. Are all these high-visibility cyber events more of the same, or are we living through a new era of cyber warfare?

 In some ways, the events of the past few months aren’t that surprising given the trajectory of cyber activity over the last decade. They’re the evolution of a steady, somewhat inevitable shift toward using digital tools as a means of international statecraft and political contestation. However, what we are seeing is also subtly different from the way experts had previously thought cyber would affect the international landscape. Over the last decade, authoritarian governments have embraced digital tools and leaned on shadowy gangs of cyber criminals to do some of their dirty work, while the pandemic has made the world reliant on the internet and created a rich world of targets for those seeking money and leverage. As a result, cyberspace may be less apocalyptic than predicted, and more like a termite infestation, eating at the very foundations of our increasingly digital societies. The good news, though, is that the long-sought international consensus on appropriate uses of cyber means within foreign policy may be finally coming together—which means there’s hope that today’s cyber disorder may eventually abate. . .

So  the post-pandemic cyber world has more vulnerabilities, more opportunities for economic and political exploitation, and more actors that blur the line between state and non-state involvement. The convergence of these bad-news trends certainly helps explain the battery of recent cyber headlines. However, there is some reason for optimism . . .

The succession of high-visibility cyber events in recent months, paired with a U.S. administration that is prioritizing cyber threats within its foreign policy, may have provided the impetus for the international community to slowly start agreeing on ways to punish problematic cyber activity.

Cyber attacks on hot dog plants or virtual elementary school classrooms may not look like the dystopian end times Panetta and Clapper warned about. But they insidiously eat away at the foundations of digital economies, societies and, ultimately, state power. Today, with these foundations crumbling, we may not need “cyber Pearl Harbor” analogies to understand the danger of cyber attacks. But can the U.S. and its now-energized allies build on this momentum to reverse the shifts wrought by authoritarian governments, the pandemic and the rise of non-state cyber criminals?

Fingers crossed.