6 ms·

Should the international laws be amended to consider state-led cyber attacks an act of war in additional to traditional aggression? Seems like UN Security Counc

Should the international laws be amended to consider state-led cyber attacks an act of war in additional to traditional aggression? Seems like UN Security Council should deal with these matters.

busterarm 6y ago
How is the UN Security Council going to do anything when China is one of its charter members? They can veto anything. Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vetoed_United_Nations_Security_Council_resolutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vetoed_United_Nations_...
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  Not to mention hacking attribution is extremely difficult. Read up on the “evidence” used to attribute the DNC hack. It’s the kind of stuff that wouldn’t pass the smell test with security engineers here.
  - busterarm 6y ago
    It's funny you say that, because I'm a security engineer and I talked to loads of other security engineers who didn't question it. People at the top of the field. It looked bogus as hell at the time, but you couldn't easily say so. Hackers are as susceptible to partisan politics as anyone else. At least we now have the benefit of the CrowdStrike President's declassified testimony.
    - ed25519FUUU 6y ago
      It took me forever to find out that the “back channel” with trump tower and Alfa Bank was a hacked Point-of-sale terminal in the lobby sending spam mail. Snopes still laughably lists this as “unproven” I remember at the time thinking “what are they doing, using an IRC channel?” https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-server-tied-to-russian-bank/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-server-tied-to-russi...
      - busterarm 6y ago
        I was screaming inside when the FBI started waving around that they had evidence and all they could show for it in public at the time was a handful of incoming HTTP requests from Russian IPs. I get hundreds of MB of traffic from Russian, Chinese, etc IP addresses every week scanning for drupal/wordpress/etc vulnerabilities. It hardly meant anything. Worse still is that we know that this happens and my colleagues still just go along with whatever companies like CrowdStrike or Trail of Bits or whoever say. Like we make business decisions based on their word alone. They're popular, so they must be correct. Group think is real and there's large numbers of us who aren't as capable as we claim to be. 95% of the work for most is checking the boxes on compliance questionnaires and getting shut down/stalled by the engineering & ops teams who actually make their companies money.
- frequentnapper 6y ago
  By recognizing Taiwan as the defacto China
  - godelmachine 6y ago
    I don't quite follow. Would you please elucidate?
    - frequentnapper 6y ago
      Taiwan and Mainland China both claim to be true China. Taiwan used to be on UN security council till it was ousted and replaced by PRC: http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/04/taiwan-still-permanent-member-security-council-despite-ouster-1971/ http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/04/taiwan-still-permanent-member.... We just have to replace them again.
      - busterarm 6y ago
        I'm all for it, but it's beyond unlikely. Even a large number of people in Taiwan today do not want to be associated with the RoC. There is a growing sentiment to express a distinctly Taiwanese identity.
      - klipt 6y ago
        What mandate would the Taiwan government have to rule China? Nobody on the mainland voted for them.
        throwaway1997 6y ago
        Nobody on the mainland voted for their current government either
        cosmie 6y ago
        The Tawainese government used to rule mainland China back when it was known as the Republic of China, before retreating to Taiwan during a civil war. They were also the "China" entity that was the founding member of the UN. It was only a few years after the UN's founding that the Communist Party won the civil war and formed a new country (the People's Republic of China), yet it took several decades for the UN to officially recognize them as the representative of "China". The argument to make isn't that they should have a mandate to rule mainland China, nor even that they should be mainland China's representative of the UN. But rather that they should be their own representative at the UN, and have claim to the permanent seat of the Security Council that mainland China currently holds, since it was originally theirs to begin with. It's a nuclear strategy that'd cause all hell to break loose if that were ever attempted, but is a plausible enough argument that it could likely be forced through if enough parties truly wanted to strip China of their veto power.
Kinrany 6y ago
It's probably best to consider them a new kind of attack. As long as they don't kill people directly, they are closer to economic wars.
riffraff 6y ago
What would the UN do with this? Quite a few wars in recent memory involved members of the security council, and the same would likely apply to cyberwarfare.
gpm 6y ago
I thought cyber attacks generally were considered acts of war. But what are you going to do about it? Start shooting in China's general direction?
- sampo 6y ago
  When Russia occupied Crimea, we introduced some half-assed trade sanctions for a little while.
caymanjim 6y ago
International law barely exists and is unenforceable. If a superpower--especially a permanent Security Council member--wants to do something, there's absolutely no recourse. Look at Russia and Crimea. That's the most egregious violation of the notion of international law in recent history, and nothing of consequence happened. The big powers can do whatever they want, and the worst response will be token economic sanctions. China is so economically intertwined with the world that nothing at all would happen unless they nuked someone.
- adventured 6y ago
  Increased encirclement & isolation (economic & political persona non grata) by a large group of the liberal affluent nations is the only approach that will work to curtail military attacks like this one. The CPC ego is extraordinarily fragile, the party's self-esteem gets injured very easily, and that should be taken advantage of. Essentially all the highest GDP per capita nations are liberal allies, they should band together and begin excluding China in unison if these military attacks continue. It's the sort of organizing the US used to be good at, and is presently failing at miserably (for obvious reasons). Germany, France and Britain are also falling down on the job as well (because they're economically scared), so there's plenty of blame to go around.
  - noir_lord 6y ago
    > Germany, France and Britain are also falling down on the job as well (because they're economically scared), so there's plenty of blame to go around. In the case of Britain we've had a disastrous handling of the pandemic which is still on going (both the illness and the handling of it) on top of Brexit and incredibly poor leadership. It'll be a decade before we return to something like normality and even then it will be in a new reality. Leaving the EU lost us our ability to stand up to the US or China in any meaningful way - for them we are just another Tuesday.
- speeder 6y ago
  There are better examples than Russia and Crimea. I am not Russian, and have nothing to do with Russia or Ukraine or whatever (I am Brazillian, of Iberian descent). Still, Crimea was not a "invasion" or "conquest". Long story short: Russia invaded Crimea in 1700s, taking it from Tartars. When a Ukranian became leader of URSS, he "gave" Crimea to Ukraine, it was only nominal, nothing changed in Crimea itself, the place still was basically a navy base for Russia. When URSS broke up, because of previous decision, it was decided Crimea was Ukranian, except most of population there is Russian (including a huge amount of Russian military), and their only warmwater seaport deep enough for the good warships Russia had, was still there, to make this work, Russia "rented" the place from Ukraine. When Ukraine most recent revolution happened, do you think all the Russian military personel families that live there since 1700s would want to leave? Now... if you want to claim what is happening in Donbass is a invasion, then that is more plausible.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
yumraj 6y ago
Just cut the undersea cables from China, there has to be a time when the world says enough is enough
- na85 6y ago
  Surely there are overland connections out of China?
  - yumraj 6y ago
    Sure, but with longer routes and severely reduced bandwidth to reduce the intensity of attacks.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    No need to cut any cables, just some routing table updates would suffice. I'm pretty sure an internet blockade these days is more effective than a sea blockade, and cutting cables is a lot harder than blackholing.
    - yumraj 6y ago
      Sure, that might work as a warning. Something like divert all Chinese traffic to /dev/null Cable cutting is a more permanent solution if warning doesn’t suffice.
- tartoran 6y ago
  The chinese censorship machine would be quite happy about that
- ISL 6y ago
  If the world were to say that enough was enough, the response would take the form of economic sanctions.
bawolff 6y ago
Given the details, it might be a nation state, it might be some bored teenager. People are constantly claiming to be attacked by nation states to hide their incompetence (nobody ever gets blamed that they failed to deter "China")

Should the international laws be amended to consider state-led cyber attacks an act of war in additional to traditional aggression? Seems like UN Security Council should deal with these matters.

busterarm 6y ago

How is the UN Security Council going to do anything when China is one of its charter members? They can veto anything. Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vetoed_United_Nations_Security_Council_resolutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vetoed_United_Nations_...

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
Not to mention hacking attribution is extremely difficult. Read up on the “evidence” used to attribute the DNC hack. It’s the kind of stuff that wouldn’t pass the smell test with security engineers here.
- busterarm 6y ago
  It's funny you say that, because I'm a security engineer and I talked to loads of other security engineers who didn't question it. People at the top of the field. It looked bogus as hell at the time, but you couldn't easily say so. Hackers are as susceptible to partisan politics as anyone else. At least we now have the benefit of the CrowdStrike President's declassified testimony.
  - ed25519FUUU 6y ago
    It took me forever to find out that the “back channel” with trump tower and Alfa Bank was a hacked Point-of-sale terminal in the lobby sending spam mail. Snopes still laughably lists this as “unproven” I remember at the time thinking “what are they doing, using an IRC channel?” https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-server-tied-to-russian-bank/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-server-tied-to-russi...
    - busterarm 6y ago
      I was screaming inside when the FBI started waving around that they had evidence and all they could show for it in public at the time was a handful of incoming HTTP requests from Russian IPs. I get hundreds of MB of traffic from Russian, Chinese, etc IP addresses every week scanning for drupal/wordpress/etc vulnerabilities. It hardly meant anything. Worse still is that we know that this happens and my colleagues still just go along with whatever companies like CrowdStrike or Trail of Bits or whoever say. Like we make business decisions based on their word alone. They're popular, so they must be correct. Group think is real and there's large numbers of us who aren't as capable as we claim to be. 95% of the work for most is checking the boxes on compliance questionnaires and getting shut down/stalled by the engineering & ops teams who actually make their companies money.
frequentnapper 6y ago
By recognizing Taiwan as the defacto China
- godelmachine 6y ago
  I don't quite follow. Would you please elucidate?
  - frequentnapper 6y ago
    Taiwan and Mainland China both claim to be true China. Taiwan used to be on UN security council till it was ousted and replaced by PRC: http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/04/taiwan-still-permanent-member-security-council-despite-ouster-1971/ http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/04/taiwan-still-permanent-member.... We just have to replace them again.
    - busterarm 6y ago
      I'm all for it, but it's beyond unlikely. Even a large number of people in Taiwan today do not want to be associated with the RoC. There is a growing sentiment to express a distinctly Taiwanese identity.
    - klipt 6y ago
      What mandate would the Taiwan government have to rule China? Nobody on the mainland voted for them.
      - throwaway1997 6y ago
        Nobody on the mainland voted for their current government either
      - cosmie 6y ago
        The Tawainese government used to rule mainland China back when it was known as the Republic of China, before retreating to Taiwan during a civil war. They were also the "China" entity that was the founding member of the UN. It was only a few years after the UN's founding that the Communist Party won the civil war and formed a new country (the People's Republic of China), yet it took several decades for the UN to officially recognize them as the representative of "China". The argument to make isn't that they should have a mandate to rule mainland China, nor even that they should be mainland China's representative of the UN. But rather that they should be their own representative at the UN, and have claim to the permanent seat of the Security Council that mainland China currently holds, since it was originally theirs to begin with. It's a nuclear strategy that'd cause all hell to break loose if that were ever attempted, but is a plausible enough argument that it could likely be forced through if enough parties truly wanted to strip China of their veto power.

Kinrany 6y ago

It's probably best to consider them a new kind of attack. As long as they don't kill people directly, they are closer to economic wars.

riffraff 6y ago

What would the UN do with this? Quite a few wars in recent memory involved members of the security council, and the same would likely apply to cyberwarfare.

gpm 6y ago

I thought cyber attacks generally were considered acts of war. But what are you going to do about it? Start shooting in China's general direction?

sampo 6y ago
When Russia occupied Crimea, we introduced some half-assed trade sanctions for a little while.

caymanjim 6y ago

International law barely exists and is unenforceable. If a superpower--especially a permanent Security Council member--wants to do something, there's absolutely no recourse. Look at Russia and Crimea. That's the most egregious violation of the notion of international law in recent history, and nothing of consequence happened. The big powers can do whatever they want, and the worst response will be token economic sanctions. China is so economically intertwined with the world that nothing at all would happen unless they nuked someone.

adventured 6y ago
Increased encirclement & isolation (economic & political persona non grata) by a large group of the liberal affluent nations is the only approach that will work to curtail military attacks like this one. The CPC ego is extraordinarily fragile, the party's self-esteem gets injured very easily, and that should be taken advantage of. Essentially all the highest GDP per capita nations are liberal allies, they should band together and begin excluding China in unison if these military attacks continue. It's the sort of organizing the US used to be good at, and is presently failing at miserably (for obvious reasons). Germany, France and Britain are also falling down on the job as well (because they're economically scared), so there's plenty of blame to go around.
- noir_lord 6y ago
  > Germany, France and Britain are also falling down on the job as well (because they're economically scared), so there's plenty of blame to go around. In the case of Britain we've had a disastrous handling of the pandemic which is still on going (both the illness and the handling of it) on top of Brexit and incredibly poor leadership. It'll be a decade before we return to something like normality and even then it will be in a new reality. Leaving the EU lost us our ability to stand up to the US or China in any meaningful way - for them we are just another Tuesday.
speeder 6y ago
There are better examples than Russia and Crimea. I am not Russian, and have nothing to do with Russia or Ukraine or whatever (I am Brazillian, of Iberian descent). Still, Crimea was not a "invasion" or "conquest". Long story short: Russia invaded Crimea in 1700s, taking it from Tartars. When a Ukranian became leader of URSS, he "gave" Crimea to Ukraine, it was only nominal, nothing changed in Crimea itself, the place still was basically a navy base for Russia. When URSS broke up, because of previous decision, it was decided Crimea was Ukranian, except most of population there is Russian (including a huge amount of Russian military), and their only warmwater seaport deep enough for the good warships Russia had, was still there, to make this work, Russia "rented" the place from Ukraine. When Ukraine most recent revolution happened, do you think all the Russian military personel families that live there since 1700s would want to leave? Now... if you want to claim what is happening in Donbass is a invasion, then that is more plausible.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

yumraj 6y ago

Just cut the undersea cables from China, there has to be a time when the world says enough is enough

na85 6y ago
Surely there are overland connections out of China?
- yumraj 6y ago
  Sure, but with longer routes and severely reduced bandwidth to reduce the intensity of attacks.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  No need to cut any cables, just some routing table updates would suffice. I'm pretty sure an internet blockade these days is more effective than a sea blockade, and cutting cables is a lot harder than blackholing.
  - yumraj 6y ago
    Sure, that might work as a warning. Something like divert all Chinese traffic to /dev/null Cable cutting is a more permanent solution if warning doesn’t suffice.
tartoran 6y ago
The chinese censorship machine would be quite happy about that
ISL 6y ago
If the world were to say that enough was enough, the response would take the form of economic sanctions.

bawolff 6y ago

Given the details, it might be a nation state, it might be some bored teenager. People are constantly claiming to be attacked by nation states to hide their incompetence (nobody ever gets blamed that they failed to deter "China")