Two of the world’s great powers have spent the last few weeks fighting a nasty war in which no quarter has been given nor asked. The result of the conflict has been chaos and destruction as the tide of battle ebbed and flowed.
In the course of the full-blown cyberwar between China and the United States, Chinese hackers have launched over a thousand attacks on US websites, including the White House and either crashed them or posted protests over the US spy plane and the dead pilot, whose fatal maneuver forced the US aircraft to land in Chinese territory. In revenge, US hackers have launched counterattacks on Chinese sites.
All of this would seem at first sight to be harmless fun. But this first cyberwar highlights serious dangers. Increasingly, the Internet is being used to store and deliver crucial data, essential to the efficient functioning of everything from the world’s capital markets to power stations and air traffic control. All of the world’s corporation keep highly confidential data on extensive computer systems. So do governments and the military. The American military uses computer networks to organize its affairs. The Internet after all grew out of the US Defense Department’s ARPAnet, created almost 30 years ago.
Hugely complex and sophisticated security measures are built into these systems but any communications expert will admit that there is no such thing as a totally secure system. A combination of human errors, dishonest programmers who leave “backdoors” into systems and sophisticated computer programs, dedicated to hacking through hundreds of thousands of passwords a minute, can all render firewalls and other security devices useless. Even computer systems that call back a specific number before a user can finally connect are not unbreakable, because callbacks can be intercepted and diverted to a hacker’s computer. The only computer that is truly safe is one which is not connected to the outside world but lives inside a vault. But these days computers have to talk to each other and as soon as a line of communication is opened, in principle, the opportunity for a hacker to break in is created.
This surely poses for us a major question which is not yet being properly addressed: what is the fallback position for any organization that discovers that its security and, therefore, the data it holds has been compromised? Is it simply enough to hold duplicates on separate systems? Is it not just as conceivable that these also could have been attacked? It is surely not just a question of keeping hard copies of all the information on computers in secure premises. That, of course, is sensible, though given the terabytes of data that fly around the world every day, it will represent a very large pile of paper indeed.
What is more important is: do we still have the old-fashioned systems and business processes in place, were our computers to become unusable? Put bluntly, can we still use pen and paper to make things work?
The dangers encompassing information technology spring not only from hackers. As we have seen recently in California, major power outages can turn state-of-the-art communications technology into useless junk. So don’t throw away your pen just yet.
