[IP] more on The first cyberterrorism?

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Dave Crocker <dcrocker@brandenburg.com>
Organization: Brandenburg InternetWorking
Date: Sat, 25 Jan 2003 15:41:18 -0600
To: John Adams <jadams01@sprynet.com>
Cc: David Farber <dave@farber.net>
Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: [IP] The first cyberterrorism?

John,

Some other folks were not clear about the meaning of my note.  I
decided to wait to respond, to let the initial heat of reaction die
down.

Let me begin by noting that the word 'terrorism' is understandably
loaded with emotion. It also is used in different ways by different
people. So the idea that one might claim that the U.S. effort could
qualify as cyberterrorism definitely runs the risk of being
misunderstood.

The intent was merely to consider the question of taking hostile,
debilitating action against a formal adversary, by using the Internet.
That, at least, was what I took from the earlier claim that there had
been no known examples of cyberterrorism.

The campaign by the U.S. effectively constituted a denial of service
attack on Iraq. That's pretty formal and it was clearly debilitating.
Massive email spam are often referenced as denial of service attacks,
so application of that label in this case is not even slightly
innovative. In fact, there are cases of individual traffic flows going
for months and consuming large percentages of a recipient network's
bandwidth.

Yes, one might say that the choice to turn off Iraq's email servers
and other Internet access were it's choice and not really caused by
the U.S.

However, that does not alter the facts that a) the attack was mounted
by the U.S. government and b) the result was termination Iraq's
Internet service.

d/

> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Adams <jadams01@sprynet.com>
> To: dave@farber.net
> Subject: Re: [IP] The first cyberterrorism?
> Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2003 15:27:56 -0500

>>  I suppose that, formally, such an act of
>>  aggression by a state is
>>  classed as
>>  warfare, rather than terrorism.
>>
>>  However it is directed at the civilian
>>  population, and it is crippling
>>  their
>>  infrastructure, so the technical aspects of
>>  cyberterrorism are probably
>>  the
>>  same.

> I started to write an indignant reply and then realized I had no
> idea whether the writer meant to say this was cyberterrorism on the
> part of the Iraqi government or the U.S. government.

> Which is it? Any opinions?


d/
-- 
 Dave <mailto:dcrocker@brandenburg.com>
 Brandenburg InternetWorking <http://www.brandenburg.com>
 t +1.408.246.8253; f +1.408.850.1850


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