New report: The line between cybercrime and cyberwar is blurred
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McAfee also called for greater transparency in current discussions on combating cybercrime. The report said, “Too much of the debate on policies related to cyberwar is happening behind closed doors.”
Analysts said although the Obama administration rectified this by bringing the cybercrime debate into the open, many other countries in the industrialized world still insist on confidentiality over the issue.
Industry sources believe criminal organizations have built alliances with adversarial governments that seek to achieve military or political advantage over democracies in the West, Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere. So intense is the interaction between cybercriminality and hostile governments that the distinction between cybercrime and cyberwar is increasingly blurred.
“The line between cybercrime and cyberwar is blurred today in large part because some nation-states see criminal organizations as useful allies. Nation-states have demonstrated that they are willing to tolerate, encourage or event direct criminal organizations and private citizens to attack enemy targets.”
In the case of the cyberattacks on Georgia, for example, civilians carried out the cyberattacks on targets while the Russian military invaded Georgia by land and air in August 2008. There is evidence that these civilians were aided and supported by Russian organized crime, as cited in a report by the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, an independent research institute.
Russia denied that its government or military provided any help to the attackers or communicated with them. Yet the same US-CCU report found that “the cyberattacks were so close in time to the corresponding military operations that there had to be close cooperation between people in the Russian military and the civilian cyberattackers,” McAfee said.
In a sobering conclusion, McAfee said, “While experts may disagree on the definition of cyberwar, there is significant evidence that nations around the world are developing, testing and in some cases using or encouraging cyber means as a method of obtaining political gain.”
Although much of that activity is shrouded in secrecy, “there is already a constant, low level of conflict occurring in cyberspace. Whether these attacks are labeled as cyber espionage, cyber activism, cyber conflict or cyberwar, they represent emerging threats in cyberspace that exist outside the realm of cybercrime.”
The report said “international cyber conflict has reached the tipping point where it is no longer just a theory, but a significant threat that nations are already wrestling with behind closed doors. The impact of a cyberwar is almost certain to extend far beyond military networks and touch the globally connected information and communications technology infrastructure upon which so many facets of modern society rely.
