Vanguard Magazine

c cYBer WAR 12 DECEMBER 2016/JANUARY 2017 www.vanguardcanada.com c omputers and information sys- tems have become a fundamental part of Canadian life. Day-to-day activities, commerce, and state- craft have gone digital. The associated information technology (IT) underpins nearly all aspects of today's society. It en- ables much of our commercial and indus- trial activity, supports our military and na- tional security operations and is essential to everyday social activities. A vast amount of data is constantly in motion and an astronomical quantity is being stored in cyberspace. Furthermore, owing to market incentives, innovation in functionality is outpacing innovation in se- curity. Additionally, neither the public nor the private sector has been successful at fully implementing existing best-known se- curity practices. Consequently, data is vul- nerable whether it is in motion or at rest. What is cyberspace? According to Dan- Canada and Cyber by John adams This essay is one in a series commissioned by Canadian Global Affairs Institute in the context of defence, security and assistance reviews by the Trudeau Government. iel Kuehl, "[c]yberspace is an operational domain whose distinctive and unique character is framed by the use of elec- tronics and the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) to create, store, modify, exchange, and exploit information via interconnected information and communication technol- ogy-based systems and their associated in- frastructures." There are several characteristics of cyber- space worthy of note: • The cost of entry into cyberspace is cheap. • For the time being, offence is easier than defence in cyberspace. • Defence of IT systems and networks re- lies on vulnerable protocols and open architectures, and the prevailing defence philosophy emphasizes threat detection, not the elimination of the vulnerabilities. • Exploits occur at great speed, putting defences under great pressure, as an at- tacker has to be successful only once, whereas the defender has to be success- ful all the time. • Range is no longer an issue, since exploi- tations can occur from anywhere in the world. • The attribution of exploits is particularly difficult, which complicates possible re- sponses. • Modern society's overwhelming reliance on cyberspace is providing any exploiter a target-rich environment, resulting in great pressure on the defender. People with expertise in software pro- gramming and manipulation concentrate their actions on exploiting the intricacies of computer networks and terrorize IT systems as follows: • Hacktivism: an exploitation motivated by political activism that often involves defacing a website for the explicit pur- pose of publicly shaming the target. • Cyber Crime: a criminal offence involv- ing a computer as the object of the crime (hacking, phishing, spamming), or as the tool used to commit a material compo- nent of the offence (child pornography, hate crimes, computer fraud). • Cyber Espionage: an exploitation to ac- cess covert information of national inter- est belonging to others. • Cyber Terrorism: the systematic threat or use of violence, often across national It's time for Ottawa, the Department of National Defence, the CAF to address our cyber war capability shortfall

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