I. The Slow and Imprecise Art of Cyber Warfare

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Notes

1 Sally Walker, ‘Into the Grey Zone Podcast: Episode Five – Cyber Power (Part II)’, Sky News, 3 June 2021, 06:00, <https://news.sky.com/story/into-the-grey-zone-podcast-episode-five-cyber-power-part-ii-12212228>, accessed 26 July 2021.

2 Ibid., 10:30.

3 National Audit Office, Investigation: WannaCry Cyber Attack and the NHS, HC 414 (London: National Audit Office, 2018).

4 This is visualised in Gartner, ‘Gartner Hype Cycle’, <https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hype-cycle>, accessed 30 March 2021.

5 US Department of Defense, ‘AUSA Global Force Symposium: Day 3 – Opening Remarks and Keynote Speaker’, 18 March 2021, 35:00, <https://dod.defense.gov/News/Special-Reports/Videos/?videoid=668339>, accessed 26 July 2021.

6 Mandi Kogosowski, ‘“We’re on the Brink of an Enormous Cyber Catastrophe”’, Israel Defense, 4 June 2021, <https://www.israeldefense.co.il/en/node/49194>, accessed 26 July 2021.

7 John R Allen and Amir Hussain, ‘On Hyperwar’, Proceedings Magazine (Vol. 143, No. 7, 2017), p. 1373.

8 Walker, ‘Into the Grey Zone Podcast’, 13:49.

9 Cyber practitioners are necessarily very precise in the language they employ. This chapter is intended to help non-cyber practitioners understand key concepts and uses analogy and imprecise terms to aid accessibility. The authors apologise to specialists in the field for the resulting lack of precision.

10 Ministry of Defence, ‘Joint Doctrine Publication 0-30: UK Air and Space Power’, 2^nd edition, December 2017, p. 17.

11 David J Peterson, Art of Language Invention, The: From Horse-Lords to Dark Elves to Sand Worms, the Words Behind World-Building (London: Penguin, 2015), pp. 21–22.

12 The subset of invented languages used in computing comprises markup and programming languages. Markup languages allow the programming instructions to not be displayed when displaying data in a non-programming language. See Thomas Powell, HTML & XHTML: The Complete Reference (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2003), p. 25. Programming languages use imperative and declarative syntax to describe and command the execution of specified functions, see Michael Gordon, Programming Language Theory and Its Implementation (Hoboken: Prentice Hall, 1988).

13 These offensive aims can be understood as the offensive mirror image of the CIA’s triad model of cybersecurity principles: confidentiality; integrity; and availability. See ‘What Is Security Analysis?’, <https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ajs300/security/CIA.htm>, accessed 21 October 2021.

14 Simon Müller, ‘Discourse Makers in Native and Non-Native English Discourse’, PhD submission to Justus Liebig University Giessen, Amsterdam, 2004; Melissa M Baese-Berk and Tuuli H Morrill, ‘Speaking Rate Consistency in Native and Non-Native Speakers of English’, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (Vol. 138, No. 3, 2015), pp. 223–28.

15 H P Sanghvi and M S Dahiya, ‘Cyber Reconnaissance: An Alarm Before Cyber Attack’, International Journal of Computer Applications (Vol. 63, No. 6, 2013), pp. 36–38.

16 This is the purpose of cyber threat intelligence. See Henry Dalziel, How to Define and Build an Effective Cyber Threat Intelligence Capability (Waltham, MA: Syngress, 2015).

17 Micah Zenko, Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2015), pp. 171–83.

18 There is an alternative distinction drawn between hacking and cracking that is framed in ethical terms, with the former being constructive and the latter destructive. In practice, this ethical distinction – while important in the early days of the internet – has fragmented. See John P Carlin with Garrett M Graff, Dawn of the Code War: America’s Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat (New York, NY: Public Affairs, 2018), chapter 1.

19 A common issue is poor hygiene in compound coding for signifier/signified correlation. See Paolo Rocchi, ‘The Concepts of Signifier/Signified Revisited’, IBM, <http://mcs.open.ac.uk/dtmd/Presentations/Session%202/Rocchi.pdf>, accessed 30 March 2021.

20 Joseph Raczynski, ‘Kill Chain: The 7 Stages of a Cyberattack’, Thomson Reuters, 12 October 2018.

21 Author interview with a senior CTI director at a major bank, March 2021; author interview with a senior military cyber warfare officer, February 2021; author interview with a law enforcement officer specialising in counter-cyber operations, January 2021.

22 House of Commons, ‘A Major Cyber Attack on the UK is a Matter of “When, Not If”’, Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, 22 January 2018, <https://houseofcommons.shorthandstories.com/jcnss-cni-report/index.html>, accessed 30 March 2021.

23 Jens Stoltenberg, ‘NATO Will Defend Itself’, NATO, last updated 29 August 2019, <https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_168435.htm?selectedLocale=en>, accessed 30 March 2021.

24 David E Sanger, ‘Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran’, New York Times, 1 June 2012.

25 Ibid.

26 Josh Fruhlinger, ‘What is Stuxnet, Who Created It and How Does It Work?’, CSO Online, 22 August 2017, <https://www.csoonline.com/article/3218104/what-is-stuxnet-who-created-it-and-how-does-it-work.html>, accessed 3 March 2021.

27 Ibid.

28 TrendMicro, ‘German Steel Plant Suffers Significant Damage from Targeted Attack’, 12 January 2015, <https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/fr/security/news/cyber-attacks/german-steel-plant-suffers-significant-damage-from-targeted-attack>, accessed 3 March 2021; Josh Fruhlinger, ‘What Is WannaCry Ransomware, How Does it Infect, and Who Was Responsible?’, CSO Online, 30 August 2018, <https://www.csoonline.com/article/3227906/what-is-wannacry-ransomware-how-does-it-infect-and-who-was-responsible.html>, accessed 3 March 2021.

29 Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).

30 Sharon Weinberger, ‘How Israel Spoofed Syria’s Air Defense System’, WIRED, 4 October 2007.

31 BBC News, ‘Israel Admits Striking Suspected Syrian Nuclear Reactor in 2007’, 21 March 2018.

32 Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations (New York, NY: Random House, 2018), pp. 590–94.