<br>Right now we're in the midst of some sort of weird publicity push from the US Military regarding cyberwar, which started before the Estonians got DDoSed last week. Most of the articles point out how China is beefing up their forces with frankly inane titles such as "China Cyberware Alert!":
<br><br><a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/internet/06/13/china.cyberspace.reut/index.html">http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/internet/06/13/china.cyberspace.reut/index.html</a><br><a href="http://www.defensetech.org/archives/003548.html">
http://www.defensetech.org/archives/003548.html</a><br>There's a NYT article today too, but they make it impossible to link to them.<br><br>In March, Stratfor had an article about it as well:<br><a href="http://www.stratfor.com/products/premium/read_article.php?id=286304">
http://www.stratfor.com/products/premium/read_article.php?id=286304</a><br>They concluded:<br>"""<br>Ultimately, much about cyberwarfare efforts will remain classified.
Cartwright's comments are more illustrative of a military that is
accustomed to dominating the battle space preparing for a new offensive
in cyberspace. STRATCOM's staff judge advocate -- the command's legal
representative -- likely has advised Cartwright that his efforts to
bring offensive cyberwarfare measures to bear have reached the point at
which they require congressional oversight and approval -- the only
real motivation for Cartwright to share his command's efforts with the
public.<br>"""<br><br>
If you listen to John Arquilla, of the Naval Postgraduate school, he
also mentions China first as the leading integrator of cyberwarfare
into their overall strategy [1]. Oddly he
believes there's only a few dozen master hackers in the world, a number
I think is far too small, but perhaps we have different definitions or
just a different circle of friends. His
estimate is that half of the master hackers are American, a number I
would say is irrelevant. You can't judge the length of a sword by the
sharpness of the point. <br>
<br>My opinion is that any cyberwar waged against the United States would be one-sided. As Admiral Yamamoto learned the hard way[2], one of the US Military's defining characteristics is extensive propaganda efforts to get the opponent to underestimate them. But as a somewhat useful metric, you can fit the attendees of all the non-US information security conferences each month into any one US conference.
<br><br>-dave<br><br>[1] <a href="http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/podcast.aspx?id=30">http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/podcast.aspx?id=30</a> - I started listening to this sure he would be full of it, but it's really quite good.
<br>[2] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoroku_Yamamoto">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoroku_Yamamoto</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoroku_Yamamoto%27s_sleeping_giant_quote">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoroku_Yamamoto%27s_sleeping_giant_quote
</a><br>