Cyber Attack by the Chinese

Just earlier this month Cyber Security made headlines, as it usually tends to do in this century. Typically, cyber attacks are often news-worthy reports due to the fact that the victims of these attacks are often high-profile organizations whose work is often considered "important" in some sense. Whether the victims are large corporations contributing to our economy or a government intelligence agency contributing to the defense of our country, the nature of cyber attacks often leave these organizations as targets.

What Happened

The National Weather Service recently confirmed that they had been the victim of a cyber attack. The attack occurred in late September but was covered up by NWS and wasn't officially disclosed until recently. The news is reporting that "mission critical" information had been targeted relating to weather-data passed to U.S Air Force systems and even systems that pass information distress signals for search and rescue operations (Johnson, A NBC News). I'm sure you can already begin to see the impact this attack could have. What I'm not sure people understand is why the NWS and it's parent organization, NOAA, would attempt to cover up this attack. Being that the nature of cyber attacks revolves around secrecy and deception, when attacks like this occur the response is usually built around damage control. The NWS is a large organization whose product is heavily relied upon by many consumers, many of whom are among the U.S military and government. The weather on your phone, local news station, and the very systems that guide the Navies aircraft carriers rely on the information provided by the NWS. For this reason, when this attack occurred, the NWS as an organization did their best to minimize the success of the attack by keeping it very hush-hush, which may have helped them out but also limits the response in reacting to the vulnerabilities created from this attack. This is an often misunderstood side of cyber warfare and is crucial to the nature of the business itself. Lack of awareness leads to vulnerabilities and vulnerabilities lead to more attacks.

Why Does this Matter?

This may not be the most pressing news headline that you've heard about this week, let alone this month. The impact, while arguably large, is rare that it will directly affect you to the point of you cursing the Chinese. Instead, this attack highlights an ongoing theme in foreign relations, cyber warfare as the new means of engagement between nation states. As the 21st century has evolved into the information age, so too have governments and societies. Information, that crucial life-blood of society we talked about last time, can be the difference between economic superiority or political unrest and civil distress. Imagine an extreme case where the internet was shut off entirely, the U.S economy is likely to grind o a halt and critical systems we take for granted everyday would become ineffective. Not to mention the logistics and effectiveness of the U.S military would be rendered near useless. While this information attack on the NWS was not an extreme example, it still serves as an example of the undercurrents in foreign affairs taking place around us everyday. The U.S Navy is one of the largest diplomatic tools the U.S has to effect political pressure on China, and a successful attack on the systems that this Navy relies on would be a big success for the Chinese. This is only on of the many known cyber attacks by the Chinese and probably one of even more unknown attacks that have been successful. Cine has often used cyber warfare to leverage their own interests and is likely to continue doing so in the future. If you're not getting it by now, Cyber Warfare is here, and here to stay.