Although the article focuses on Syria - it arguably fits in with the two previous posts on cyber war.
A “S.E.A.-Change” in Military Contingency Planning
BY PAUL ROSENZWEIG
New Republic
SECURITY STATES
OCTOBER 1, 2013
Is America at risk from a counter-strike by Syria if it launched a military attack against Syria's chemical weapons? Yes—but not in the traditional way. A Syrian response would likely be of a different, asymmetric cyber form. And that’s a whole new way of thinking about war and contingencies.
For the past several weeks American leaders have been considering a military strike in Syria (a possibility that seems to have faded in recent days). Lurking behind the controversy and debate about whether that sort of strike would be good policy is a problem that must be driving military planners to distraction—America is no longer immune. Any decision to launch missiles at Syrian chemical weapons targets must incorporate an answer to the question—what will Syria do in response?
It used to be that when military planners considered questions like that, the answer was modest derision, at best. What, after all, could Syria (or most other countries) do to threaten America?
When, in 1998, the United States launched Tomahawk missiles into Sudan, it assuredly was worried about the diplomatic consequences of its actions. But that was all. Bombs in Sudan were not going to result in bombs falling on New York City. For that matter, even when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Americans could be confident that military action would be limited to the Middle East. Iraq couldn’t strike at America directly.
Likewise, when Israeli warplanes destroyed an Iraqi nuclear plant in 1981, and when they destroyed a nascent Syrian reactor in 2007, the government no doubt had to consider a number of contingencies for reactions by Iraq, Syria, and the world. They might, for example, have worried that their ally, the United States, would take retaliatory diplomatic action against them. And they might have considered whether their military action would generate a terrorist response from Syria’s allies in Lebanon.
But in none of these cases did either Israel or America need to give significant consideration to the contingency of a military response from their opponents. The disparity in military strength (along, in the case of the US, with geographic distance) made a military counterattack essentially impossible. Both countries could, in effect, strike at military targets with near impunity.
That’s not true anymore.
As it plans strikes in Syria, the Administration has to consider whether groups like the Syrian Electronic Army (S.E.A.) can execute effective cyber counterstrikes here in the United States. The S.E.A. has been described as a “collective of pro-[Bashir al-]Assad hackers and online activists” who operate with the support of the Syrian regime (if not its actual connivance). It is easy to overstate the problem and speak apocalyptically of the capabilities of the S.E.A. But it would also be unwise to dismiss them as a non-existent threat.
When they first came on the scene, the S.E.A. hacked into Twitter and Facebook accounts, so that it could publish fake news about the conflict in Syria. And it sometimes engaged in DDoS attacks on the web pages of opponents of the Syrian government. [A DDoS attack is a Distributed Denial of Service attack—it involves an automated massive flooding of a website with malicious traffic. So much that legitimate traffic is crowded out and the website is, effectively, taken off line. It’s a bit like hitting a website with a fire hose ….]. While demonstrating some capability, most experts saw these as relatively unsophisticated attacks.
In recent months, however, the S.E.A. has seemed to get better—quite a bit better. In August 2013, for example, the S.E.A. hijacked the New York Times web page. How they did it is a lesson in the new asymmetry of conflict in cyberspace.
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http://www.newrepublic.com/article/1...gency-planning