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Foreign Policy
Harder Than It Looks
Several years ago a former intelligence official claimed that with 20 good hackers and a few tens of millions of dollars he could bring the nation’s infrastructure-and thus the country-to its knees.
Are advanced societies really so vulnerable?
Until hackers take over an electricity grid or a phone system, no one will really know for sure. But there are three reasons why nations may be harder to take down than people think:
First, the ease with which a corporate Web site can be breached reveals little about the vulnerability of core processes such as power distribution systems, call control centers, funds transfer mechanisms, or new product engineering. The former is engineered to be publicly accessible; after all, what good is an e-commerce Web site if no one can see it? Anecdotal evidence suggests that, over the last two to five years, many companies have cut back on the connectivity between the more open and closed parts of their networks.
Second, taking control of a system when no one is looking is not the same as keeping control over a system once people are alerted. Brief control suffices to steal information, but it requires more than a flicker or a temporary busy signal to cause real damage to societies. Defenders, in turn, have several built-in advantages: law enforcement (the longer hackers stay online the easier they are to trace), detailed knowledge of their own systems, and physical control not only of network connections but of data storage and access sites. In some cases, the machinery controlled by information systems can revert to manual or default settings and carry on.
Third, the assumption that modern civilization will collapse without its network-based infrastructures can be overly glib. Granted, electricity is central to modern times. Even so, agriculture, construction, many heavy industries, the military, and even education can continue functioning without it (temperature permitting). At the other end of the scale, people managed to live normal well-adjusted lives before cellular telephones and the World Wide Web—and with sufficient ingenuity and the force of circumstance they could learn to do so again.
–M.L.