[luftderfreiheit]

What fascinating times we live in.

My interpretation of the general history of warfare is that countries agree on restraint once some situation has occurred that all sides agree should never happen again. Mustard gas in WWI, nuclear weapons in WWII...

Hopefully this doesn't spiral out of control. It's not clear where the boundaries are that we don't want to cross.

[terminado]

Well, right now, we're in a place where The Internet really only facilitates greater efficiency in telecommunications, and does so in such a way that can be distributed and encapsulated across many independent partitions.

In other words, whatever we would be capable of accomplishing with pen and ink on paper, and carrier pigeons, or smoke signals; that's what the internet does, but at nearly the speed of light, for volumes of data beyond anything worth attempting as a physical implementation.

In that sense, the only thing that denial of service really accomplishes for a hermit state like North Korea (which presumably attempts to censor the external internet for it's non-elite commoners already), is such that they lose face on "the world stage" where they receive no respect anyway.

The boundaries where things start to get ugly, in a new and truly modern sense, would be circumstances where autonomous weapons platforms run rampant, and inflict wide-spread death and destruction in various theaters of conflict at scales of their own choosing. I don't think that's a reality yet, at least not without a nuclear exchange. Drones, for the most part, are still essentially remote-controlled vehicles, operated by humans, particularly with respect to the decision to use force.

A scaled back version of that, which we might see emerge, before autonomous robots are used to crush a nation like it were a load of dirty laundry (or rather, before robots start to decide for themselves, which nations, or regions to crush), is infrastructure attacks that cripple things like electric and water services for extended periods, triggering cascades of famine and disease. For that to occur, a country would have to foolishly place all of its eggs in one basket, and lay prone to catastrophic failure without proper redundancies in place.

[gaius]

Unless your target is stupid enough to connect their SCADA systems to the Internet.

[at-fates-hands]

>>> Hopefully this doesn't spiral out of control. It's not clear where the boundaries are that we don't want to cross.

It's been spiraling out of control for years.

I'm actually quite surprised at how restrained our government has been to actually engage some of these rogue countries after decades of ongoing attacks.

At some point, you have to return fire.

And yes, I'm quite aware the US has been active in several high profile attacks. Unfortunately, it pales in comparison to what China, DPRK, and several middle eastern countries have been engaged in for much longer.

[fleitz]

Restrained?

They invaded the country, and got their asses handed to them by the Chinese. The geopolitical situation is, invade NK, fight the red army.

[ForHackernews]

I'd be pretty happy if governments all decided "cyberwarfare" was an acceptable substitute for the real thing. Nobody dies, some money is lost, some important people are embarrassed.

[logfromblammo]

Cyberwarfare can do a lot more than DDoS a router. Haven't you ever read the articles that pop up from time to time about Internet scans that find machines which should in no way ever be connected to the Internet, or even in the same room with a machine connected to the Internet? And then they try to log into those machines using the manufacturer's default passwords....

In short, critical infrastructure all over the world is being needlessly put at risk. The operators are placing their own knives across their own throats, and all a network-based attacker would need to do is jog a few elbows.

A few people might die. It's not like anybody is putting kill-bots out there, connected to the Internet, with an easily-toggled BERSERK_RAMPAGE flag (yet), but I think water treatment plants and electrical power grids are probably vulnerable to attack, and could cause some folks at the margins to die.

[abvdasker]

> Nobody dies, some money is lost, some important people are embarrassed

If there's one thing the Sony breach and other major hacks over the last few years have illustrated, it's that there is no clear limit to the damage that can be done from something like this.

EDIT: To me, what's so frightening about this is the lack of historical precedent for conflicts between nations in the form of cyberwarfare. We don't know what could happen. We don't know if the damage will be limited to financial cost and embarrassment, and we don't know that a scuffle between nations on the Internet will remain contained as such.

[Bud]

"Nobody dies" is likely false. Think about first responders. Think about medical systems in hospitals. Think about all the second-order and third-order side effects if the Internet goes down in an industrialized country in 2014 for longer than, say, a few hours.

People would definitely die.

[oakwhiz]

And the right to privacy of innocent noncombatants is compromised in the process. There will in fact be casualties in a cyber war, even if people are not killed or physically injured.

[JabavuAdams]

If the power grid goes down in Canada and the US in January, then people will die. If it stays down because turbines have been damaged, then lots of people will die.

[cubano]

some important people are embarrassed.

Which is pretty much exactly why it won't happen.

[towelguy]

How would they decide who wins?

[slayed0]

The smae way they decide in a normal war. They keep going until a treaty is signed. Typically the side who is worse off "throws in the towel" so to speak by signing a treaty that holds the favor of the stronger side.

[fleitz]

NK is not going to launch a nuclear attack on the US. The point of NKs weapons is a barrier to entry to invasion. eg. If you attack us Seoul gets nuked. Once they've launched nuclear weapons there is no point in not invading them.

If NK nuked Seoul, in all honesty China would probably nuke Pyongyang long before the Americans, or just send eleventy million troops across the border.

The entire reason NK exists is because China prefers a border with NK rather than a unified Korea sympathetic to US interests.

[saidajigumi]

> Hopefully this doesn't spiral out of control.

As others have pointed out, it's unclear that the US government is itself involved. Neither the attacks on Sony and the attacks on the North Korean internet links require uniquely state-owned military resources. They just require a relatively accessible set of knowledge, skills, and practical tools. We even get the term "script kiddies" from the long-running case of those with knowledge and skills creating tools that encapsulate same.

So what happens in a world where "warfare" level activities, causing significant disruption to nations and multinational corporations, are accessible to essentially random individuals? In the U.S. we might liken it to our mythology: the lawlessness of the Wild West. Yet it seems that lawlessness with this kind of ease-to-impact ratio is unprecedented.