This article was reported by
John Markoff,
David E. Sanger and
Thom
Shanker.
It was written by Mr. Sanger
January 25, 2010
Credit:
This article was reported by
John Markoff,
David E. Sanger and
Thom
Shanker.
It was written by Mr. Sanger
January 25, 2010
|
edited by Don |
|
In its final years, the Bush administration started a highly classified effort, led by Melissa Hathaway, to build the foundations of a national cyber deterrence strategy. “We didn’t even come close,” she said in a recent interview. Her hope had been to recreate Project Solarium, which President Dwight D. Eisenhower began in the sunroom of the White House in 1953, to come up with new ways of thinking about the nuclear threats then facing the country. “There was a lot of good work done, but it lacked the rigor of the original Solarium Project. They didn’t produce what you need to do decision making.” Ms. Hathaway was asked to stay on to run Mr. Obama’s early review. Yet when the unclassified version of its report was published in the spring, there was little mention of deterrence. She left the administration when she was not chosen as the White House cyber security coordinator. After a delay of seven months, that post is now filled: Howard A. Schmidt, a veteran computer specialist, reported for work last week, just as the government was sorting through the lessons of the Google attack and calculating its chances of halting a more serious one in the future. “The fact of the matter,” said one senior intelligence official, “is that unless Google had told us about the attack on it and other companies, we probably never would have seen it. When you think about that, it’s really scary.” "If we stand still for a minute, our adversaries will overtake us." "Our concepts are like defensive warfare’s greatest failure, the Maginot Line."
But first you would have to figure out who was behind the attack. Even Google’s engineers could not track, with absolute certainty, the attackers who appeared to be trying to steal their source code and, perhaps, insert a “Trojan horse” — a backdoor entryway to attack — in Google’s search engines. Chinese officials have denied their government was involved, and said nothing about American demands that it investigate. Left unsaid is whether the Obama administration has decided whether it would ever threaten retaliatory cyber attacks or military attacks after a major cyber attack on American targets. Google broke the silence that usually surrounds cyber attacks; most American banks or companies do not want to admit their computer systems were pierced. Google has said it will stop censoring searches conducted by Chinese, even if that means being thrown out of China. The threat alone is an attempt at deterrence: Google’s executives are essentially betting that Beijing will back down, lift censorship of searches and crack down on the torrent of cyberattacks that pour out of China every day. If not, millions of young Chinese will be deprived of the Google search engine, and be left to the ones controlled by the Chinese government. |
Credit:
http://www.pj6.com/14/NYTCore.htm
