3/26/20, 1:19 PMIn Cyberwar, There are No Rules – Foreign Policy
Page 1 of 18https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/12/in-cyberwar-there-are-no-rules-cybersecurity-war-defense/#
FEATURE
IN CYBERWAR,THERE ARE NO
RULESWhy the world desperately needs
digital Geneva Conventions.
BY TARAH WHEELERILLUSTRATIONS BY KYLE HILTON FOR FOREIGN POLICY
SEPTEMBER 12, 2018, 8:00 AM
In 1984, a science fiction movie starring an up-and-coming Austrian-American actor took the box office by storm. A
cybernetic organism is sent back in time to seek out and kill the
mother of a great war hero to prevent his subsequent birth. The
3/26/20, 1:19 PMIn Cyberwar, There are No Rules – Foreign Policy
Page 2 of 18https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/12/in-cyberwar-there-are-no-rules-cybersecurity-war-defense/#
cyborg scans a phone book page and begins methodically killing all
women named Sarah Connor in the Los Angeles area, starting at the
top of the list.
If The Terminator were set in today’s world, the movie would have
ended after four and a half minutes. The correct Sarah Connor
would have been identified with nothing but a last name and a zip
code—information leaked last year in the massive Equifax data
breach. The war against the machines would have been over before
it started, and no one would have ever noticed. The most frightening
thing about cyberwarfare is just how specifically targeted it can be:
An enemy can leap national boundaries to strike at a single person,
a class of people, or a geographic area.
Nor would a cyborg be necessary today. According to U.S. census
data, there are currently 87 people in the United States named Sarah
Connor. Many of them probably drive cellular-enabled cars that run
outdated firmware, use public unencrypted Wi-Fi, and visit doctors
who keep unsecured health care records about patient allergies and
current medications on computers running the infamously
outdated and vulnerable Windows XP operating system.
These days, warfare is
conducted on land, by sea, in
the air, across space, and now in
the fifth battleground:
cyberspace. Yet so far, the U.S.
government has fumbled on
cybersecurity, outsourcing
So far, the U.S. governmenthas fumbled oncybersecurity, outsourcingmuch of that area of conflictto the private sector inaccordance with the Trump
3/26/20, 1:19 PMIn Cyberwar, There are No Rules – Foreign Policy
Page 3 of 18https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/12/in-cyberwar-there-are-no-rules-cybersecurity-war-defense/#
much of that area of conflict to
the private sector in accordance
with the Trump
administration’s most recent
National Security Strategy—
leaving the country exposed to foreign attack.
Those third parties operate under exactly the same incentives as any
pharmaceutical company. If a company’s service is the treatment of
symptoms, preventive medicine is a threat to its business model.
Meanwhile, pundits, policymakers, and publishers take as gospel
what they’re told by so-called cybersecurity experts who have more
social media followers than relevant credentials in the field, which
is how hysterical “The Hackers Are Coming for Us” editorials find
their way into otherwise respectable publications.
Increased fear, uncertainty, and doubt surrounding cybersecurity
have led to a world where we cannot tell what has and hasn’t
happened. The nature of cyberwarfare is that it is asymmetric.
Single combatants can find and exploit small holes in the massive
defenses of countries and country-sized companies. It won’t be
cutting-edge cyberattacks that cause the much-feared cyber-Pearl
Harbor in the United States or elsewhere. Instead, it will likely be
mundane strikes against industrial control systems, transportation
networks, and health care providers—because their infrastructure is
out of date, poorly maintained, ill-understood, and often
unpatchable. Worse will be the invisible manipulation of public
opinion and election outcomes using digital tools such as targeted
advertising and deep fakes—recordings and videos that can
administration’s most recentNational Security Strategy—leaving the country exposedto foreign attack.
3/26/20, 1:19 PMIn Cyberwar, There are No Rules – Foreign Policy
Page 4 of 18https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/12/in-cyberwar-there-are-no-rules-cybersecurity-war-defense/#
realistically be made via artificial intelligence to sound like any
world leader.
The great challenge for military and cybersecurity professionals is
that incoming attacks are not predictable, and current strategies for
prevention tend to share the flawed assumption that the rules of
conventional war extend to cyberspace as well. Cyberwarfare does
have rules, but they’re not the ones we’re used to—and a sense of
fair play isn’t one of them. Moreover, these rules are not intuitive to
generals versed in fighting conventional wars.
That’s a problem because cyberwar won’t be waged with the
informed participation of much of the U.S. technology sector, as the
recent revolts at Google over AI contracts with the U.S. Defense
Department and at Microsoft over office software contracts with U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement demonstrate. That leaves
only governments and properly incentivized multinational
corporations to set the rules. Neither has yet provided a workable
and operational definition of what constitutes a globally recognized
act of war—a vital first step in seeking to prevent such
transgressions.
3/26/20, 1:19 PMIn Cyberwar, There are No Rules – Foreign Policy
Page 5 of 18https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/12/in-cyberwar-there-are-no-rules-cybersecurity-war-defense/#
The closest that the U.S. military has come to such adefinition is to say that “acts of significant consequence” would be
examined on a case-by-case basis and could require congressional
evaluation. But given how quickly a cyberattack could disable
critical infrastructure, expecting Congress to react in time to answer
effectively is unrealistic.
In a world where partisan politics have been weaponized, a smart
misinformation campaign by a foreign state that targeted only one
political party might even be welcomed by other parties so long as
there was plausible deniability—and with cyberattacks, attribution
is rarely certain.
There is also a serious risk of collateral damage in cyberoperations.
Most militaries understand that they are responsible not only for
targeting strikes so that they hit valid targets but also for civilian
casualties caused by their actions. Though significant collateral
damage assessment occurs prior to the United States authorizing
cyberoperations, there is no international agreement requiring
other powers to take the same care.
A major cyberattack against the United States in 2014 was a clear
example of how civilians can bear the brunt of such operations.
Almost all cybersecurity experts and the FBI believe that the Sony
3/26/20, 1:19 PMIn Cyberwar, There are No Rules – Foreign Policy
Page 6 of 18https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/12/in-cyberwar-there-are-no-rules-cybersecurity-war-defense/#
Pictures hack that year originated in North Korea. A hostile country
hit a U.S. civilian target with the intention of destabilizing a major
corporation, and it succeeded. Sony’s estimated cleanup costs were
more than $100 million. The conventional warfare equivalent might
look like the physical destruction of a Texas oil field or an
Appalachian coal mine. If such a valuable civilian resource had been
intentionally destroyed by a foreign adversary, it would be
considered an act of war.
In the near future, attacks like the Sony hack will not be exceptional.
There are countless vulnerabilities that could result in mass
casualties, and there are no agreed norms or rules to define or
punish such crimes. Consider the following examples.
Once a week, a European aircraft manufacturer cleans all plane
cockpits of Android malware. Pilots can pass malware to the plane
from their smartphones when they plug them in, which the plane
(while theoretically unaffected by phone-only malware) then passes
it on to the next pilot with a smartphone. Planes are already covered
in viruses, both virtual and microbial. In such a vulnerable
environment, even an unsophisticated hack could wreak havoc. A
text message sent to the phone of every in-air pilot giving them a
national security warning or rerouting their planes could lead to
emergency landings and widespread confusion, with more
sophisticated attacks potentially leading to far more serious
consequences.
Aviation is not the only vulnerable sector. The U.S. health care
system is full of medical devices running ancient firmware or
3/26/20, 1:19 PMIn Cyberwar, There are No Rules – Foreign Policy
Page 7 of 18https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/12/in-cyberwar-there-are-no-rules-cybersecurity-war-defense/#
operating systems that simply cannot be patched or hardened
against commonly known network intrusions. Small hospitals often
cannot afford to replace their medical equipment on a regular
schedule, and device providers may deprioritize or block security
patches or upgrades in order to sell updated devices in the next
round of production.
That’s a problem in an era when many surgical procedures are
assisted by robots, which hospitals struggle to keep secure. The
medical device industry focuses more on performance and patient
health outcomes than on keeping a cyberadversary at bay. A
cyberattack on hospitals using robotic surgical devices could cause
them to malfunction while in use, resulting in fatal injuries. If a
country or terrorist group decided to take out a sitting U.S. senator
undergoing robotically assisted surgery and then covered its tracks,
the perpetrator’s identity would be hard to pinpoint, and there
would be no clear U.S. legal precedent for classifying the hacking of
hospital equipment as an assassination or an act of war. Nor do
there appear to be clear protocols for retaliation.
There are less direct potential vectors of attack, too. Recently, a cold
storage facility for embryos in Cleveland failed to notice that a
remotely accessible alarm on its holding tanks had been turned off,
leading to the loss of more than 4,000 frozen eggs and embryos.
Many operators of industrial control systems never bother to change
all their default passwords or security credentials, which can leave
them vulnerable to ransomware attacks, and even fewer health care
officials are likely to assume that someone might deliberately shut
off sensors that monitor the viability of future human life. It is
3/26/20, 1:19 PMIn Cyberwar, There are No Rules – Foreign Policy
Page 8 of 18https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/12/in-cyberwar-there-are-no-rules-cybersecurity-war-defense/#
difficult to determine whether the Cleveland eggs and embryos were
lost due to a simple maintenance failure or deliberate tampering—
but as techniques such as the freezing of eggs become more
common in wealthy nations, such a simple attack could wipe out
thousands of future citizens.
There is no functional difference between a foreignsoldier taking an ax to refrigerant tanks to destroy 4,000 eggs and
embryos and that same soldier using a keyboard to remotely shut
down the facility’s temperature maintenance protocols from 6,000
miles away. The two acts are equally heinous on a moral level. The
uncertainty in attribution and the lack of an easily identified villain
3/26/20, 1:19 PMIn Cyberwar, There are No Rules – Foreign Policy
Page 9 of 18https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/12/in-cyberwar-there-are-no-rules-cybersecurity-war-defense/#
may make the latter seem the province of science fiction. But it is
not.
Cyberattacks—some egregious, some mundane—are happening
now, quietly and unnoticed by the public. Much of the confusion
and fear over cybersecurity comes from the distorted publicity
surrounding a few outlying events. While cybersecurity experts
can’t have perfect certainty over attribution or even the existence of
some attacks, we can understand the larger security landscape, in
which cybersecurity is merely a banal and predictable component of
national infrastructure. The risk of cyberattacks is knowable,
probabilistically.
Technology and cyberspace are changing faster than countries can
legislate internally and negotiate externally. Part of the problem
with defining and evaluating acts of cyberwarfare against the United
States is that U.S. law is unclear and unsettled when it comes to
defining what constitutes an illegal cyberact as opposed to normal
computer activity by information security researchers.
The legal status of most information security research in the United
States therefore remains unclear, as it is governed by the poorly
drafted and arbitrarily enforced 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse
Act (CFAA)—a piece of legislation that was roundly derided by tech
experts on its inception and has only grown more unpopular since.
The law creates unnecessary fear that simple and useful
information security research methods could be maliciously
prosecuted.
These methods include network scanning using tools such as Nmap
3/26/20, 1:19 PMIn Cyberwar, There are No Rules – Foreign Policy
Page 10 of 18https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/12/in-cyberwar-there-are-no-rules-cybersecurity-war-defense/#
(a computer network discovery and mapping tool) or Shodan (a
search engine for devices on the internet of things) to find
unsecured points of access to systems. Such scanning does not
constitute the exploitation of computer or network vulnerabilities; a
real-world equivalent would be walking down a street and noting
broken windows, open doors, and missing fence planks without
actually trespassing on someone else’s property. One of the fastest
fixes for the dismal state of federal cybersecurity expertise would be
to overturn the CFAA and reward cybersecurity researchers engaged
in preventive research instead of tying their hands with fears of
breaking the law. Yet at present the U.S. government ham-handedly
discourages many information security researchers from entering
what should be a noble service.
This dynamic has left the U.S. government with critical shortfalls in
top-level information security experts. The United States simply
lacks a viable legislative plan for hardening its infrastructure against
cyberattacks and developing much-needed cybertalent. Any strong
defense against cyberattacks should follow the same principles used
for basic U.S. infrastructure design: strategists plan, technicians
execute, and experts examine. For example, the interstate highway
system in the United States, authorized in 1956 to enable rapid
military transport of troops and supplies, also had much broader
civilian benefits.
Now, through neglect, roads in the United States are riddled with
potholes, widening cracks, and crumbling asphalt; thousands of
deaths on U.S. highways per year are related to poor road conditions.
Yet potholes are the most boring problem imaginable for a
3/26/20, 1:19 PMIn Cyberwar, There are No Rules – Foreign Policy
Page 11 of 18https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/12/in-cyberwar-there-are-no-rules-cybersecurity-war-defense/#
policymaker. By contrast, whenever a bridge collapses, it grabs
headlines—even though a comparatively small number of people
per year die from bridge catastrophes. Incident response is
appealing; it lets policymakers show their leadership chops in front
of cameras, smoke, and sirens. The drudgery of repairing underlying
problems and preventing the disasters in the first place takes a back
seat. This is dull but essential policy work, and the same goes for
technology infrastructure. If cyberwork isn’t boring, we’re doing it
wrong.
Cybersecurity should be akin to a routine vaccine, a line item in the
infrastructure budget like highway maintenance. Basic
cybersecurity measures—such as upgrades to encryption, testing
the capability of recovery in the event of data loss, and routine
audits for appropriate user access—should be built into every
organizational budget. When incidents happen—and they will
happen as surely as bridges collapse—they should be examined by
competent auditors and incident responders with regulatory
authority, just as major incidents involving airlines are handled by
the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).
At present, however, the United States lacks an NTSB for
cybersecurity. Due to the government’s lack of expertise, it is overly
reliant on large companies such as EY, PwC, and Deloitte to handle
this work. If the U.S. government isn’t capable of running a post-
mortem on major cyberevents, citizens should be asking why—
instead of letting lawmakers hand the work to contractors.
Responding to major cyberattacks requires battalions of highly
trained government analysts, not armies of accountants and
3/26/20, 1:19 PMIn Cyberwar, There are No Rules – Foreign Policy
Page 12 of 18https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/12/in-cyberwar-there-are-no-rules-cybersecurity-war-defense/#
attorneys.
Yet the White House, under President Donald Trump, has failed to
fill or has outright eliminated almost every major cybersecurity
position. There are a few brilliant holdouts bravely providing solid
advice on information security and best practices. (The government
agency 18F and the United States Digital Service are both doing
valuable work but receive far smaller budgets than they deserve.)
But cybertalent is draining faster than it is being replaced at the
highest levels.
Cyberdefense isn’t magic. It’s plumbing and wiring and pothole
repair. It’s dull, hard, and endless. The work is more maintenance
crew than Navy SEAL Team 6. It’s best suited for people who have a
burning desire to keep people safe without any real need for glory
beyond the joy of solving the next puzzle.
The challenge for policymakers is the same as it ever was: Improving
lowest-common denominator infrastructure in cybersecurity makes
for the most effective defense against ill-intentioned adversaries.
Yet politicians have been slow to respond since there’s little pork in
password policies, and forcing everyone to improve their encryption
takes a distant second place to kissing babies on the campaign trail.
3/26/20, 1:19 PMIn Cyberwar, There are No Rules – Foreign Policy
Page 13 of 18https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/12/in-cyberwar-there-are-no-rules-cybersecurity-war-defense/#
When devastating attacks happen on U.S. soil, peopleuse metonyms to describe them. No one has to describe the specifics
of Pearl Harbor or 9/11; we already know what they signify. When the
cyberattack that lives in infamy happens, it will be so horrifying that
there won’t be a ready comparison. It won’t be the cyber-Pearl
3/26/20, 1:19 PMIn Cyberwar, There are No Rules – Foreign Policy
Page 14 of 18https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/12/in-cyberwar-there-are-no-rules-cybersecurity-war-defense/#
Harbor. It will have its own name.
Until that point, however, these attacks will remain nameless.
People are frightened of what they can see and understand, not
what they cannot imagine and do not comprehend, and, as a result,
it’s easy to ignore the twice-removed effects of a quiet but deadly
cyberattack. Given that it took more than a decade and a half to
successfully prosecute war criminals from the Yugoslav wars of the
mid-1990s even with overwhelming photographic evidence and
personal testimony, it’s not surprising that the international
community has a hard time agreeing on what constitutes a
cyberattack deserving of reprisal—especially when countries can’t
even settle on a definition for themselves.
The first step to improving cyberdefense would be to determine
what does, in fact, constitute a cyberattack by a foreign power as
opposed to a mere prank or industrial espionage. Then officials and
legislators need to decide what constitutes an act of justifiable self-
defense during and after such an attack.
To date, there have been few attempts to create such global norms.
In 2013, a group of experts on digital law convened in Tallinn,
Estonia, and wrote the Tallinn Manual, the closest thing to digital
Geneva Conventions the world currently has. (In 2017, it was
updated to the Tallinn Manual 2.0.) It defined the characteristics of
a cyberattack, including targeting and disabling critical
infrastructure, hitting health care facilities, destroying
transportation corridors or vehicles containing people, and
attempts to penetrate the computer networks of opposing military
3/26/20, 1:19 PMIn Cyberwar, There are No Rules – Foreign Policy
Page 15 of 18https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/12/in-cyberwar-there-are-no-rules-cybersecurity-war-defense/#
forces. The original manual was less clear about disinformation
campaigns and hacking elections but did deem interference in a
foreign country’s elections a violation of state sovereignty if it
included an attempt at regime change.
In the run-up to the 2017 German parliamentary elections, a string
of cyberattacks led to fears of Russian meddling, but according to
the Charter of the United Nations, unless armed force has been
brought to bear within the borders of a country, no internationally
recognized act of aggression has occurred. This definition of war is
hopelessly out of date.
Similarly, cyberattacks in the Netherlands in 2017 and 2018 resulted
in the denial of government funding and vital services to citizens,
but because conventional battlefield weapons weren’t used, the U.N.
Charter’s provisions weren’t violated. Countries are beginning to
coalesce around the idea that some forms of active countermeasures
are justified in self-defense, if not in actual reciprocation, under
international law.
Reaching an international consensus on what triggers a country’s
right to self-defense in cyberspace requires a coherent, common
understanding on where to draw the line between nefarious
economic or intelligence activities and true cyberattacks.
One model could take shape if Russian interference in foreign
elections is proved beyond any reasonable doubt. Drawing a chain
of evidence between Russian state-sponsored election meddling via
a cyberattack and actual election outcomes could lead to a global
consensus on what constitutes extralegal military activity in
3/26/20, 1:19 PMIn Cyberwar, There are No Rules – Foreign Policy
Page 16 of 18https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/12/in-cyberwar-there-are-no-rules-cybersecurity-war-defense/#
cyberspace. It’s already clear that elections in multiple countries
have been meddled with, and no militaries have visibly responded.
In the U.S. case, former President Barack Obama responded by
declaring a month before he left office that the United States would
respond at a time and place of its choosing. But his successor has
not visibly followed through on that threat, at least in cyberspace.
No definition of a cyber-related war crime can be effective without
international legitimacy. If a group of experts actually did convene
to create binding digital Geneva Conventions, it’s unclear from what
source it would derive its authority. NATO sponsored the Tallinn
conference, but the Tallinn Manual is nonbinding and was not an
official NATO publication. Moreover, the alliance itself is currently
on shaky ground, and there’s no guarantee that the United States
would abide by any agreement.
In the absence of a binding global accord, the world will remain
vulnerable to a motley mix of hackers, warriors, intelligence
operatives, criminals, and angry teenagers—none of whom can be
distinguished from behind three proxy servers. It would be nearly
impossible to identify perpetrators with 100 percent confidence if
they take even rudimentary steps to cover their digital tracks after
cyberattacks.
Were disaster to strike Southern California tomorrow, scientific tests
and forensic analysis would allow us to tell whether it was an
earthquake or a bomb—even if both events could destroy
approximately the same amount of property. Yet it would be very
easy to confuse a distributed denial of service attack on a U.S.
3/26/20, 1:19 PMIn Cyberwar, There are No Rules – Foreign Policy
Page 17 of 18https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/12/in-cyberwar-there-are-no-rules-cybersecurity-war-defense/#
government website launched for fun by a few juvenile hackers in
St. Petersburg with an attack launched by the Russian military to
deliberately deny U.S. citizens the ability to register to vote or collect
entitlements. Cyber-enabled disinformation campaigns are equally
problematic to attribute and to punish. Despite the consensus
among experts and intelligence services that Russia tampered with
the 2016 U.S. presidential election, it is proving extremely difficult to
gain nonpartisan consensus that Russian-targeted advertising
purchases on social media constitute hostile acts by a foreign power.
The challenge today is the rapid speed at which cyberspace morphs
and evolves. It is changing faster than international summits can be
convened, making obsolete any deal that takes longer than a week
or two to negotiate. Even if one country can come to an internal
agreement on what constitutes a cyberattack from one private party
to another, there’s no guarantee that two countries could do the
same. But they will have to try.
Habits tend to become tradition. That’s how the 1648 Peace of
Westphalia, intellectually inspired by Hugo Grotius, came to define
the modern nation-state and govern international relations. Grotius,
a Dutch lawyer and the father of just-war theory, defined the first
series of rules by which an anarchic international order could begin
to structure itself. After 370 years, the concept of the modern state
seems largely set in stone and has been repeatedly reinforced by its
use as a framework for relations.
The international community needs new habits for a new era.
Leaders must follow NATO’s tentative footsteps in Tallinn and
3/26/20, 1:19 PMIn Cyberwar, There are No Rules – Foreign Policy
Page 18 of 18https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/12/in-cyberwar-there-are-no-rules-cybersecurity-war-defense/#
convene digital Geneva Conventions that produce a few deep, well-
enforced rules surrounding the conduct of war in cyberspace.
Cyberwar is the continuation of kinetic war by plausibly deniable
means. Without a global consensus on what constitutes cyberwar,
the world will be left in an anarchic state governed by contradictory
laws and norms and vulnerable to the possibility of a devastating
war launched by a few anonymous keystrokes.
This article originally appeared in the Fall 2018 issue of Foreign
Policymagazine.
Tarah Wheeler is an information security researcher and politicalscientist. She is aNew America cybersecurity policy fellow and senior director of datatrust and threat and vulnerability management atSplunk. Twitter: @tarah