Will there be an Olympic Cyber War (and what’s being done about it)

Last Updated on Monday, 4 August 2008 12:55 Written by admin Monday, 4 August 2008 11:20

According to this article in Dark Reading, the company handling IT for the Olympics is expecting one. Atos Origin has been the go-to company for the International Olympic Committee’s IT needs since the 1992 Barcelona Games. According to an email received by the writer of the Dark Reading article:

”Estimated security alert events from different IT systems could be more than 200 million during the Olympic Games time,” explained an Atos Origin spokeswoman, in an email. “We have built a sophisticated real-time security monitoring system to monitor every network port and PC running on this network [and] very high standard system hardening has been applied to all IT systems.”

Specific details on security measures aren’t being disclosed, however one focal point that is sure to be a tempting target is the futuristic Beijing Data Center (see above photo). Dubbed “Digital Beijing“, it’s 11 stories tall with over one million square feet of state-of-the-art facilities.

Officials describe Digital Beijing as an “information service center for the municipal government’s data storage, information security, emergency-response command, and information service,” adding that the site will also serve as a communication hub for other Olympic sites in areas such as Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tianjin.

I did some digging and found a November, 2007 article which sheds some light on the IT Infrastructure of the Beijing Olympic Games as well as a bit more detail on the security planning. I’m not convinced that Atos Origin, a French company with clients mostly in Europe, has the necessary expertise to defend Digital Beijing against a serious cyber attack, but I hope that U.S. agencies will be observing with interest because considering Beijing’s cyberwarfare activities to date, and the tensions between Tibet and China,  this will surely be an interesting case study in cyber warfare.

UPDATE: One of my preferred sites for information on Chinese Hackers is The Dark Visitor so this morning I sent intelligence veteran Heike (who’s one of the most self-effacing experts on this topic that you’ll ever meet) an email asking for his opinion. Here’s his informal but very interesting reply:

Our view is sort of from the opposite direction, China attacking outside the country.  There have been a lot of posts in the hacker forums on people worried about attacks during the Olympics but nothing specific.  To be more accurate, their (Chinese hackers) tone is worried/excited that they have another opportunity to defend the motherland.

The number one topic of conversation is hacks against the timing devices for the games.  Read about Beijing’s preps for having self-contained processing units and it all sounds pretty good to someone like me who is untrained.

As for predictions…yes, hard to see some of these groups not using the games as a political tool.  Broad audience, makes the PRC government lose face, promote their cause, collect money…etc.  Then of course the human error that will be attributed to hackers from the outside and you can be sure it will be reported that way.

Regarding Beijing’s “self-contained processing units”, the Games Management System is not connected to the local Intranet which is usually a pretty effective security measure. In fact, there’s reportedly never been a successful hack into the core system.

Related Links:

ISN Security Watch – Intel Brief: Chinese Cyberwarfare

10,000 Methods combined as One: Chinese hackers and Unrestricted Warfare

Cyberwarfare and the Game of Go

Last Updated on Saturday, 2 August 2008 10:39 Written by Jeffreycarr Monday, 28 July 2008 06:16

When playing Go, resentments clear away. Thought become like the moon arising at night. There, on the beach of the ocean of endless births and deaths the Go stones become uncountable grains of sand. The white and black stones become the colors of day and night , the star-points become the nine lights of heaven, the three hundred and sixty intersections render the numbers of the days of the year. (from the Noh play Go)

The U.S. Air Force released its list of Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant topics today. Predictably there were several in the area of cyberwarfare. This is a tough issue, not just for the USAF but for all of the military services as well as the intelligence agencies like the NSA and the Central Security Service who are tasked with the responsibility of protecting our critical information infrastructure, among other duties.

LTG Keith Alexander (US Army) wrote “Warfighting in Cyberspace” for the Joint Forces Quarterly almost one year ago today, and covered the challenges quite well. Here’s an excerpt:

The speed at which the cyberspace domain is evolving and its ever-growing impact on national security make this potentially as critical a period as that faced by Mitchell, Claire Chennault, and their contemporaries as they realized the potential of the air domain and sought to develop airpower doctrine. Unfortunately, we do not have the luxury of 20 years to develop strategy, tactics, and doctrine to deal with this revolution and maintain U.S. superiority in this rapidly changing environment.

The trends for advances in technology, often (correctly or incorrectly) related to Moore’s Law and derivative theories, such as the Law of Accelerating Returns proposed by Ray Kurzweil in his 2001 essay, dictate that we must move quickly. If one examines the advances in Internet and computer technology in just the last 5 years, it is readily apparent that we could find ourselves behind or even militarily irrelevant in cyberspace.

It struck me this morning that the game of Go offers a paradigm that’s similiar to the distributed network of cloud computing. Most of our nation’s legacy networks (including the Department of Defense) are obvious targets for the cyberwarfare activities of our opponents. By moving strategic networks into the cloud, we can deny our opponents a hard target to focus on. Additionally, by leaving old networks in place as a focus for cyber attacks, we employ the Weiqi strategy of Lure the Tiger down from the Mountain; i.e., don’t fight where your enemy is strong.

It’s clear that innovation is called for when thinking about cyberwarfare. Perhaps considering the strategies of an ancient Chinese board game can inform our future tactics in cyberspace.

See also Unrestricted Warfare, The Chinese Box, and the Game of Go

UPDATE: Here’s an excellent post on some of the security advantages offered by Cloud Computing.