A new report lists cyber attacks as the greatest threat to U.S. security. Here's why you shouldn't be too worried.
By Kelsey D. Atherton Posted 03.14.2013 at 5:00 pm 8 Comments

Cyber War Training
Cyber War Training U.S. Navy via wikimedia commons

Cyber attacks are the top threat facing the United States, according to a report that the Director of National Intelligence published this week. That is new. Most national threats of yore implied some sort of physical damage--terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, nuclear warfare, and so on. Placing cyber attacks in the number one spot reveals a few things about how the nature of security has changed.

1. The trend is toward less dangerous threats.

For much of the past decade, terrorism was widely believed to be the top threat facing the United States. Understandably so: The aughts opened with the most horrific terrorist attack on U.S. soil to date and saw dangerous radicals in Madrid, London, Mumbai, and elsewhere plant bombs or launch other smaller attacks. These are scary things, but such attacks are also rare and small-scale.

Cyber attacks, while potentially very disruptive to the economy or power grid, are unlikely to kill nearly as many people as terrorism. (Or, for that matter, be anywhere near as terrifying as the nuclear standoff that dominated much of the last century.) Fear of cyber attacks on critical infrastructure and military controls should encourage the United States to adopt better security measures, and to judge by the White House’s recent cyber security initiative and the Pentagon vowing to launch cyber counter-attacks, it looks like we have some promising momentum. (Though, um, some recent announcements about weak cyber defenses and firing cyber defense inspectors show we still have a long way to go.)

Regardless: if we're to go by verified reports, the number of people killed by cyber attacks so far is exactly zero. Of course, it's possible that someday, cyber attacks could sabotage a computing system, causing a crash that kills people. But right now, when describing cyber attack casualties, we have to talk about it in hypothetical terms because there are no actual cases.

However new and scary this threat is portrayed cyber attacks alone won’t kill anyone. For proof, watch this German telecom real-time map of ongoing cyber attacks for a few minutes and then note how many places attacked are suddenly reduced to post-apocalyptic wastelands. Keep this in mind the next time a politician warns about “cyber 9/11” or “cyber Pearl Harbor.”

2. Cyber is very different from other threats, and needs to be treated accordingly.

We're used to thinking of security threats as things that go boom and end in dead bodies. The overwhelming majority of cyber attacks will instead look more like crime or spycraft. Cyber attacks are useful for getting at and stealing data, especially that held by governments or businesses. When cyber attacks do cause physical damage, it's so far been through industrial sabotage that breaks complicated machines. Attacks like this, focused on data stealing, financial meddling, or industrial sabotage are best dealt with law enforcement and intelligence agenices. LulzSec, a hacking group that brought sites offline throughout the summer of 2011, was compromised and later brought down by police tracking down one of their members in person and turning him into an informant. Zero Dark Thirty this isn't.

There is the potential for cyber attacks to be deadly, but the most likely way for that to happen is a cyber attack against critical infrastructure like powerplants, dam controls, pentagon computers as part of a broader attack by regular military forces. This isn't exactly new; disabling enemy equipment or intercepting enemy communications is as old as communication itself, and the Pentagon has already said it will treat such attacks as acts of war.

3. Cyber is a threat now because very few other things are.

Even at the height of a budget crisis and with automatic spending cuts in effect, the United States spends more on its military than the next nine biggest military spenders in the world. In terms of conventional military power, no nations come close to the United States. We are living in a largely unprecedented era of safety. Cyber attacks, like terrorist attacks before it, will cause some harm. But these are primarily attacks used by small militant groups or criminals, or even nations that cannot challenge the U.S. by conventional means. That is actually a good thing. Whenever I see a headline panicking about cyber war, it just reminds me that we live in an era where the risk of conventional war or nuclear war is negligible.

8 Comments

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ghost
03/14/13 at 5:56 pm

i would say this is a pretty good thing seeing as north korea has already stated that it will bomb the united states with some kind of nuclear weapon. no demands. just, bombing america, like they were going out for groceries while stopping at the bank.

to mars or bust!

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AnyIcon
03/14/13 at 7:08 pm

How to maintain your own importance:

Open all the doors of communication and when the bad guys of the world come stealing and destroying the common people lives, the common people will storm the castle\government to save them.

In other words, when the internet was created, the defense system could of been established from the beginning, but by waiting, the government re-assures its own importance in protecting the people... Oye!

"From the beginning they're were and are better Operating Systems with all the doors close from the start!"

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vanessacalhoun9
03/14/13 at 7:36 pm

before I looked at the draft saying $9306, I be certain that...my... neighbours mother was like actualie making money part time on-line.. there sisters roommate has been doing this 4 only about 11 months and just now cleared the loans on their cottage and bourt a brand new Citroën 2CV. I went here,..business8.MEL7.Com

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ghost
03/15/13 at 2:30 am

^what? that's not spam. that's not even shit. that is not trying. that is... i don't even know what the fuck that is...

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quasi44
03/16/13 at 7:51 pm

We have to talk about death from cyberattack as a hypothetical? Even if no one in Iran died from Stuxnet destroying their cyclotrons, they certainly could have. You wouldn't have wanted to be next to one that day.

When the ISS was attacked, all onboard could have been killed.

I submit that there have been deaths caused by cyberattacks already, as hospitals around the world have taken cyberattacks that shut down their systems, and it has been going on so long that it has to have killed people by now.

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SocialAnomoly
03/18/13 at 3:05 am

I see so many behind-the-scene truths about this article. I have no worry as to whether you know of them or not or wish to hide them from the world, for many people will catch on and that will spread to all vertices of the globe. I like how you mention that cyber warfare is a threat now and only now because [communism, drugs, and political terrorism are put on the back-burner] very few other things are. You're gearing us up for the decade in America's war machine most probably to be known as the War on Cybersecurity. You put a special emphasis on cybersecurity for the government and corporate-related information while sidestepping any notion that if cybersecurity were a real threat we as individual people would be involved. What you are doing, even if you don't realize it, is getting people to focus in on very narrow corridors of reality where things we hear and see that we think are affecting the country and world but somehow stay out of our personal lives when this entire paradigm is actually just staged by the game players of the modern age (entities like the United Nations, British Petroleum, Exxon Mobile, the CIA, the Trilateral Commission, NATO, etc.). We are economic units only whose thoughts and moralities are subverted into a state of thinking where the players themselves can hide in plain sight. This system is pathetic; it's fragile and it cannot be supported by people who even slightly deviate from a faux version of reality that is oppressively pushed down all of the world that we like to call 'the social norm.' Our thinking (which was most likely brought upon serendipitously by and when the players were rising to power) is somehow that every culture in the entire world's social norms are different from everyone elses but that social norms are even real. If we can't deviate from a social norm as set by Amerika(tm) within Amerika(tm) or else 'society'-itself would fall apart, what makes people think that other versions of society don't fall apart with radically different social norms? Social norms are not even real.

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AnyIcon
03/18/13 at 8:39 am

If a cyber attack could be stop, I imagine the same technology should be able out all the SPAM on PoPSCi.

Until then, I would not hold my breath!


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