Hacker
group: The future of war is information
December 30, 1999
CNN ©
Web posted at: 1:13 p.m. EST (1813 GMT)
by Douglas F. Gray
BERLIN
(IDG) -- In a sign of how wars will be fought in the
future, this year's conflict in Serbia relied on using
technology to a new extent. In addition to being fought
with weapons, it was fought with information.
In the future, it will be this type of
"information warfare" that will make it
difficult to figure out if countries are even at war
with each other, according to Frank Rieger, who follows
the topic for hacker group Chaos Computer Club.
Rieger, speaking at the 16th annual
Chaos Communication Congress here in Berlin, said that
information is such an important aspect of war that
"if the Americans feel that destroying civilian
infrastructure is necessary, they will do it, by all
means."
Rieger doesn't feel that the U.S. is
the only country with this mindset, but because they are
the only remaining superpower, they are the most
visible.
"The main method of attack by
NATO during the (Kosovo) war was to destroy
communications infrastructure in Serbia," Rieger
said. "They tried to hit the tanks first, but the
Serbs had too many decoys, so NATO would blow up the
decoys... it came down to the fact that the Serbs would
protect their military infrastructure by simply not
using it."
The Serbs also used their own methods
of information warfare. "They monitored GSM (global
systems for mobile communications) traffic from German
and NATO troops who were calling their families at home.
The Serbs would then call the families of the NATO
troops in the guise of a NATO officer, and tell the
families that the soldier was killed in battle,"
according to Rieger.
He was not so quick, however, at
pointing to the mistaken bombing of the Chinese embassy
as information warfare. "It could be that (NATO)
was fed false information by the Serbs, but it's more
likely that the Americans were the victims of their own
military snafu," Rieger said.
The value of communications
interception in warfare has already been seen, and in
the future countries will find new methods of waging
information warfare, Rieger said. "Most of the wars
are fought, if not won, by signals intelligence.
Countries now simply fight by disrupting the
communication of the enemy," he added.
"The border between war and peace
is becoming more diffused. Soon, you will not even be
able to tell if countries like India and Pakistan are at
war, or at peace," Rieger said.
For instance, a government could
destabilize the economies and governments of neighboring
countries by spreading false information. Rieger
compared this to a high-tech form of dropping leaflets.
"However, leaflets are distinguishable as leaflets,
the key is feeding false information to a source that
can be trusted (by the target country)," he added.
One confusing aspect of information
warfare is that a communications systems glitch is not
necessarily an attack by a hostile country. For example,
in conventional warfare a dropped bomb is obviously an
attack, but in information warfare, it's difficult to
tell if a communications problem is a deliberate attack,
hacking, or simply a system malfunction.
"One of the things we (at the
Choas Computer Club) are doing now is raising the
consciousness of the hackers not to cause any diplomatic
problems," Rieger said. "We are telling them
to select other targets to explore," he added.
"Altering the home page of the Israeli embassy is
not a good idea."
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