Greg White is the Head of UK Public Sector at Symantec Corporation. The views expressed here however are his own. These comments were a response to the discussions that took place last month at the Wesminster e-forum on cybercime.
Following Stuxnet and now Flame we appear to be in a period where nation states might be using Cyberspace to achieve their global aims without resorting to warfare.
These threats appear to be capable of increasingly devastating effect on infrastructure, are carefully targetted, and are so complex that expert assessment suggests these must funded and driven by a motivated government rather than organised crime or corporate action.
Yet, it has been a consistent view of the speakers during the event that a culture encouraging cyber awareness and responsibility should be encouraged from students to board room, in the home the office and across the public sector.
At a domestic level we seem to have a clear view that malware is immoral and a ‘bad’ thing, that using it for fiscal, commercial or reputatuonal gain at the expense of others is a criminal act, and that such attacks launched across borders are adequately treated from a legal perspective under the Budapest framework.
Yet the apparent targets of Stuxnet and Flame suggest that the motivated parties launching them are quite possibly among the same Western democracies advocating a safe and secure cyberspace.
So should an attack on a third party escape condemnation so long as the originating party maintains anonymity and the target is deemed undesirable?
Has acceptance that national security sevices can launch attacks during peace-time, without legal or democratic oversight, and potentially risking cyber cold war escalation, become the norm?
Is it not time for the UK Government to stand behind an initiative seeking an international convention condemning attacks and ultimately by extension these states who launch malware attacking other states they are technically at peace with, regardless of whether they sit in the ‘Axis of Evil’, expansive asian states, or are otherwise lawful Western democracies?
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