Army Commander says at cyber warfare conference:

Ensure cyber security

Text of the speech by Army Commander Lieutenant General Jagath Jayasuriya on ‘Strategic Dimensions of Cyber Warfare’ at cyber warfare workshop on Tuesday

We can define a conflict as a struggle carried on with the use of arms between nations or parties who are having contending wishes by land, sea, or air. This is the physical space which we talk about and we have won the 30 years of physical war in Sri Lanka. But warfare has not come to an end by eliminating terrorists from this country. We and the whole world whether there is any physical war or not are faced with another war which is known as ‘Cyber War’.

Army Commander Lieutenant General Jagath Jayasuriya delivering the keynote address on ‘Strategic Dimensions of Cyber Warfare’ at the cyber warfare workshop on Tuesday. Picture by Thushara Fernando

You know that after the World War II there was something called Cold War among the nations. The aim of the involved nations was to develop their technology and reach milestones before the opposing nations, having the fear of another World War. This was prominent between US and USSR at that time.

Traditionally to win a war the essential components are the fire power of the army, manoeuvre capability, protection of men and equipment, standard of leadership, status of morale, last but not the least information and intelligence where you know about yourself and the enemy. Efforts are made to keep your information as secret as possible while obtaining enemy information as much as possible.

Communication technology

As you know, information is the resource, target and the weapon in information warfare. The field of information and communication technology facilitates processing and transferring of information better than any traditional medium. Cyberspace is the information super highway across the entire world. This has given rise to cyber warfare which is an emerging threat to the entire world.

Cyberspace has made the popular concept of Global Village a reality. There is no need for me to define what cyberspace is as you all are aware of it. In general cyber warfare can be defined as “actions by nations or groups to penetrate another nation’s or group’s computers, networks or websites through the Cyberspace for the purposes of causing damage or disruption”. To make it simple it is “a war combated in the medium of Cyberspace other than the traditional mediums of land, water or air.”

I do not intend to talk much on theoretical aspects of cyber warfare. You already know that there are several types of cyber attacks such as virus and worm attacks, denial of service attacks (DoS), web defacements of informational sites and unauthorized intrusions into systems.

Strategic issues

You must also know that unsolicited e-mails, bogus websites, chat programs, remote controlling software, web applications, software updates, free software with malicious codes, Trojans and etc etc are the main vulnerabilities we have.

But when it comes to practical aspects there are many strategic issues which we have to deal with.

It is not a secret that 9-11 attack was the eye opener for united States and whole world on terrorism. United States of America’s image as the ‘World Superpower’ was tarnished with this attack. Since most of you are with some technical background you understand the gravity of cyber warfare. But an ordinary person would never think that a cyber attack can cause more or less a similar sort of damage as of 9-11. Of course a cyber attack might not kill people as in a physical attack. But who knows what future technology is capable of Let us draw our attention on some case studies to understand this better.

Popular rebellion

WikiLeaks is the most popular name which is talked these days with respect to cyber warfare of 21st Century. WikiLeaks leaked some 250,000 classified State Department information and became a popular rebellion amongst hundreds or thousands of tech-savvy activists.

Do you know what happened to Estonia in 2007?

Number of government and corporate sites in Estonia, including Estonian parliament, banks, ministries, newspapers and broadcasters were hacked and entire Estonian network came to a point that it was useless.

Estonian authorities traced those attacks to Russia, and suggested they had been orchestrated by the Kremlin and that charge was denied by Moscow. Some refer to this attack as Cyber War 1.

Another good example is Stuxnet computer worm which targeted mainly the industrial equipment. This was first discovered in July 2010 by Virus Blok Ada, a security firm based in Belarus. This worm had the ability to reprogram industrial systems and probable target is said to have been high valued Siemens controlled infrastructures in Iran. You might be surprised to hear that the infestation by this worm said to have damaged Iran’s nuclear facilities in Natanz and eventually delayed the start up of Iran’s Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant. Siemens initially stated that the worm had not caused any damage, but on November 29, Iran confirmed that its nuclear program had indeed been damaged by Stuxnet.

Physical disasters

So far I did not mention any physical disasters caused by a cyber attack. In 1982, the CIA showed how a piece of code that changes the workings of a system could cause a physical damage. The agency exploded a Soviet gas pipeline in Siberia without using a missile or bomb, but a string of computer code. This is a classic example to show that even assassinations are possible with cyber attacks in near future.

Those are few of the examples from around the world. But don’t forget that during the humanitarian operation our website also encountered a web defacement attack. Even at present there are continuous efforts been made to hack into our network which we have successfully defended up to now.

There is nothing you can name which does not have some connection to the cyberspace. You name anything, all the information is available in the cyberspace. Every organization depends at least to some extent from the cyberspace and sooner or later the dependency would reach to a compelling state. More you depend more you become vulnerable.

Pro-LTTE activists

If we talk about the Sri Lankan context during the civil war, main targets were the three forces, even though civilians and economic institutions were also bombed and attacked. If Sri Lanka is going to be attacked through cyberspace who would be the targets?

To be continued