The Battlefield Transformed

Uploaded on 2023-10-02 in NEWS-Cybersecurity News, GOVERNMENT-Defence, FREE TO VIEW

The initial phase of warfare now often begins with the hacking of utilities and public entities, before the military aspect of war fighting is about to start. This disruption of infrastructure is the first strike in warfare with the aim to create chaos and disinformation.

Cyber warfare represents a fundamental transformation in the very nature of the concept of conflict, not only changing the weapons of modern conflict, but radically shifting the nature of the battlefield.

Cyber and electronic warfare are distinct entities as the former involves hackers using information systems and the Internet to disrupt or attack states or companies for strategic and military purposes. This can take multiple forms. A denial-of-service attack floods the target with traffic and/or data that triggers a crash intended to shut down a machine or network.

An advanced persistent threat is a network attack in which an unauthorised person accesses a network and remains undetected for a long period of time in order to steal data.

Malware is an overarching term for hostile or intrusive software, such as trojans, computer viruses, worms and ransomware, while spear phishing involves the deployment of fraudulent emails to induce a target into revealing confidential information.

Current Concerns

US intelligence officials believe that malware could give China the power to disrupt or slow American deployments, or resupply operations, including during a Chinese move against Taiwan. “The United States is challenged by malicious cyber actors who seek to exploit our technological vulnerabilities and undermine our military's competitive edge... They target our critical infrastructure and endanger the American people. Defending against and defeating these cyber threats is a Department of Defense (DoD) imperative,” say the US 2023 Cyber Strategy from the US Department of Defence.

Malware has recently been discovered in US military networks on Guam. This could suggest China’s strategy to disrupt military mobilisation at the outset of a conflict, but it is also a signal to significantly increase cyber security preparations, a top defense cyber official said.

China’s “living off the land” techniques suggest a “theory of disrupting military mobilisation, but also sowing chaos in the United States and for the United States military,” Mieke Eoyang, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy, told reporters Friday 15th Sept at the Defense Writers Group. “It is the second piece of that, the sowing chaos, that would cause harm to the American people that we find an anathema. That is not something that we, the United States military, would do to deliberately harm civilians with no military nexus there.”

The Pentagon expects adversaries to disrupt military mobility, but the ‘living off the land’ techniques, which use tools that are built in to a system or network to evade detection, could unduly harm civilians, she said:

“Our obligations under the laws of armed conflict would require us to have some kind of military necessity in the operations that we would conduct… and so we have some real concerns about what that activity might mean.” But China’s use of those tactics is also a call for broad adoption of zero-trust management tools “to better monitor and log network activity to be able to identify things that look anomalous, and be able to figure out if that's in fact, just something weird, or that's actually malicious activity on their networks,” Eoyang said.

The Pentagon wants to have a complete Zero Trust architecture by 2027 as a way to prevent insider threats. In particular, the new document identifies zero trust as a way to “frustrate future malicious cyber activity” and as a bedrock for expanding cyber capabilities. It could also be essential to relaying classified information on the battlefield, as well as on bases and among offices across tye us defense establishment.

Defense One: Atlantic Council: US Army: New York Times: US Dept Of Defense: DNYUZ:

Global Defence: Arthur D Little: Grizzly Image: Sashkinw

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