Cyberattacks: Acts of war?

Hackers of the world, beware, said Siobhan Gorman and Julian E. Barnes in The Wall Street Journal. The Pentagon is fed up and is not going to take it anymore. Alarmed by the increasingly sophisticated hacking of the computer systems of American companies and the U.S. government itself, the Pentagon is creating a new national strategy that would classify serious cyberattacks as acts of war, meriting a traditional military retaliation. “If you shut down our power grid,” said one military official, “maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks.” In an era when nearly everything is controlled by computers, this new policy is “long overdue,” said The Kansas City Star in an editorial. Russia is widely thought to have breached U.S. military computer systems in 2008, while Chinese hackers penetrated Google’s servers last year. Lockheed Martin, one of our largest military contractors, recently admitted its computer system had been infiltrated by an unknown hacker.

The threat that cyberwarfare poses is enormous, said Con Coughlin in the London Telegraph. Hostile regimes such as China and Russia now employ hundreds of sophisticated hackers to probe the West’s computer systems. It’s possible that enemy nations, or terrorists, could shut down power grids, plunging entire regions into darkness, or create havoc with water and natural gas supplies, or shut down banks and stock markets. In fact, one intelligence source told me, the consequences of a cyberattack could be more devastating “than an al Qaida dirty nuclear bomb.”

But a threat to bomb hackers may not be the answer, said David E. Hoffman in Foreign Policy. “In cyberconflict, it is not often possible to know who the attackers are,” as they cover their tracks by rerouting through servers around the world. Often, they are employed not by governments but by “smaller players and non-state actors.” And while talk of putting a missile down someone’s smokestack is “gratifyingly macho,” said James Temple in the San Francisco Chronicle, China and Russia simply won’t believe the U.S. would kick off World War III over a data breach. A wiser option might simply be a “cyber-response in kind.” The next time we suspect a foreign nation of sponsoring a cyberattack, the U.S. should launch a counter-cyberattack on its computers, followed by the classic “‘Who, us?’ shrug of digital deniability.” That would serve as a more concrete deterrent than “empty rhetoric” about missiles.

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