Fighting a war without a single shot being fired
By Nimrat Duggal Khandpur

AN entire industry has been built by the need to communicate. What started with the signs prehistoric man developed to "talk" is now a multi-billion dollar industry, spawning satellites and millionaires. Timely and accurate information has been a necessity at almost every stage in history and in this age it seems to be actually feasible. This advance has come with its inherent drawback — the threat of information war. The seriousness of this threat is borne out by the fact that the Central Intelligence Agency has stated that it treats information warfare as one of the two main threats to American security, the other being chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

Information warfare is, quite simply, withholding or supplying incorrect or misleading information to one’s adversary while ensuring one’s own communication channels are open and not tampered with. Information warfare has existed in a primitive form since war started. During the Persian Wars, Phidippides sacrificed his life racing from the site of the battle of Marathon to Athens, in a bid to provide the timely information of the Greek victory over the Persians. In this century, the Normandy landing is a classic example of a significant victory attained through successfully withholding information from the enemy.

One aspect of information warfare is physical attack, leading to destruction of enemy communications systems like satellites, computer centres and cables etc. The more significant aspect is the ‘logical attack’, wherein instead of removing the source of information, you ‘doctor’ information convincingly so that your adversary bases important strategic decisions on that information. Through both these aspects, you target the adversary’s decision-making process.

Having established the target in information warfare, let us consider the elements that can be attacked. You can attack the elements that generate, transfer or store information. These vary from something as basic as the newspaper to sophisticated computers, which are susceptible to attacks varying from viruses to simple physical destruction. In the popular film, Independence Day, the world is saved through the insertion of a virus into the aliens’ computer system. Long before this film was made, both the Cubans and the KGB had developed computer viruses to be used as offensive weapons while portable weapons which can destroy unshielded electronic circuitry have been developed.

In conjunction with this or alternatively, you can jeopardise the processes for handling and dissemination of information. One way to do this, ironically enough, is through excess of information. During the Gulf War, the Aegis Information System and the E-2/E-3 surveillance aircraft provided so much data that computer studying the data were overloading and locking up. As a result, the surveillance area had to be reduced. On the flip side, one of the reasons being cited for the "intelligence failure of the decade", the inability of foreign intelligence agencies to detect indications of an impending nuclear test at Pokhran, is that area coverage by the limited number of orbiting satellites is not absolute.

This enabled our scientists to calculate the movement of US spy satellites so that preparations for the tests were suspended when they were over Pokhran. This "concealment" was aided by ‘deception’, that is, preparations for testing Agni at Chandipur in Orissa were intensified so that the focus of intelligence agencies was on Chandipur.

Last year, the New York Times had carried a front page story that India was about to carry out nuclear tests. When these tests did not occur, senior administration officials claimed they had dissuaded India from carrying out the tests. Again, truth is contextual and it is now a matter of conjecture whether prior knowledge of the impending tests could have enabled the Clinton administration to persuade the Indian government to call off the tests or not.

It has been acknowledged that world approval or disapproval can affect decision making. It follows then that the intellectual processes for interpreting and using information can be targeted. This is a time-honoured technique which has been fine-tuned from the brash propaganda of earlier decades to a subtle influencing of attitudes. An example of this is the metamorphosis of American society from one for which the word ‘communist’ was virtually an abuse to one which practically supplied communist China with technological know-how. An editorial in the Times of India dated May 19 ‘98, attributed this transformation to "well orchestrated efforts using sophisticated information technology".

However, traditional propaganda remains a very effective weapon for shaping world opinion as was borne out in the accusation made by Richard Butler in an interview in the BBC. He referred to an "exquisitely" planned Iraqi propaganda campaign to distract attention from the issue at stake, i.e., weapons of mass destruction, and focus it instead first on ‘palaces’ and then on UNSCOM. He was responding to a questioner who asked him to explain why common people found it difficult to grasp how a refusal to inspect some palaces should spark off a near-war situation.

An example of information warfare wherein the majority, the common people think that the USA is overreacting and Iraq is being victimised. The variation in propaganda in today’s world is that, thanks to contemporary technology, instead of the same message being targeted via mass media to influence a mass audience, the varied and various modes of communication, from newspapers to the Internet, enable personalised, ‘customised’ information attacks.

Information warfare may seem like something that concerns only Internet users or men and women using high-tech communication systems. However, if civilian computer networks are targeted, telecommunication systems can crash, air and rail traffic control can be disrupted — the possibilities are awesome.

It follows then that the aggressors in information warfare need not be enemy nations alone. Organised terrorist groups are capable of launching an information war, the means are available to all those with the expertise. Hackers, or crackers, frequently demonstrate the vulnerability of supposedly secure government and commercial systems. In an exercise, the Pentagon’s own network security technicians succeeded in penetrating over 85 per cent of the Department of Defence systems they hacked and were undetected in over 95 per cent of their attacks.

Hackers can be divided into two categories — the amateurs and the professionals. Although the amateurs receive a lot of publicity the network-ninjas or professionals, who sell their expertise, are the real threat. For example, Colombian drug cartels had hired network-ninjas to install and run a sophisticated and secure communications system while Amsterdam based gangs use them to monitor and disrupt the communications and information systems of police surveillance teams.

It is of interest to note that it might not be possible for information managers to distinguish between attacks and events like accidents, system failures or hacking. In fact, information management is extremely vulnerable due to frequent advances in information technology. This was demonstrated during recent joint operations carried out by the US Navy and Air Force. Attempts to pass imagery failed because of the incompatibility of systems. Not only can an adversary exploit this problem, but if information managers are used to seeing unreadable data either because it has been coded or simply because data conversion has not been performed, they will not be able to detect if data is corrupted. They might attribute it to inadequacies in their system.

Network-ninjas and information managers-now that I have started using the jargon of IW, let me give you a preview of the vocabulary currently developing in ‘cyberspace’ and seminars. Some synonyms for network-ninjas are cyber-mercenaries, knowledge-warriors, web-warriors and info-warriors. And the newest term is "atomic hackers’’, the name given to the hackers who allegedly broke into the BARC computer systems. Even information warfare does not have a single word to describe it. Some of the words you are likely to come across are — information-based warfare, command and control warfare, information operations, netwar, cyberwar and, in Russian usage, sixth-generation warfare. And the "virtual actors" created by digital technology are to be called "synthespians". Move over, Tom and Jerry, animation is being replaced by virtual reality!

Since the possibility of information warfare exists, there must be a defence. The most obvious steps are incorporating design elements that ask for authentication and encryption of data. It is important for security to be placed in a fashion to ensure maximum security. One of the supposed "atomic hackers" was quoted as saying that certain things were "secured to the bone and yet other things were completely obsolete". Another practical step in the prevention of cyber-attacks or cyber-raids is monitoring all senders and receivers of data on networks.

Most information systems crash or fail at some time or the other, whether there is a bug in the software or whether a single computer or an entire system crashes. Even Bill Gates suffered the same fate when he was demonstrating some features of Windows 98 at a computer trade show in Chicago. When a Microsoft employee attempted to plug in a scanner, the system crashed and Gates had to shift to another computer to complete the preview.

Imagine then a critical, time-bound analysis of information that can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, terminally afflicted by a system crash. To avoid this, safe fail designs need to be incorporated into computers, software, networks and the larger systems they are part of and interact with.

Netwar, cyberwar, network-ninjas-these words reek of sensational science fiction. Maybe that is why information warfare seems to be something that affects only high-tech military establishments and Net surfers. But it is wise to remember that all you might need is a ‘doctored’ film, like the movie Forrest Gump, which shows the hero shaking hands with a long-dead John F Kennedy to spark off a war. And maybe victory will go to the technologically superior nation without a single shot being fired.