Cyberwar: The threat to Australia

In his book, Cyberwar, former US presidential adviser on cybersecurity Richard Clarke lays out the case for militarisation of the net. He points to conflicts in Estonia and South Ossetia where conventional attacks coincided too closely with the cyber to be coincidence. And in North Korea where, for a country with scarcely a power grid, he says they have 1000 military hackers.

And then there’s Stuxnet, a suspected Israel-US operation to knock out Iran’s nuclear program.

How prepared is Australia for all-out cyberwar?

James Turner, IBRS: Considering the experiences we've seen over the past 18 months – Stuxnet, Project Aurora, WikiLeaks – what are the implications for Australia and what can we actually do?

Graham Ingram, AusCERT: I’d like to get an awareness of the size of the problem. Unless you’ve identified and accepted that this is where you’re at, it’s very hard to fix.

Keith Price, AISA: This is a never ending universe. There’s always something new – we saw companies such as RSA, who make encryption products, get breached.

Loke-Yeow Wong, ArcSight/HP:

I spent the first 10 years of my career with end-users, taking care of security for companies and the most recent eight years as a vendor. Hopefully I can take back ideas.

Eric Byres, Tofino Security: As a Scada [supervisory control and data acquisition] engineer, what can we do to make these systems work for people in the trenches? I’m interested in ways to solve what is a pretty serious issue.

Marcus Sachs, Verizon: Cyberspace, while it’s man-made, is not optimised for warfare and the question is do we want it to be or is it better optimised for economic value, which hopefully is the latter of the two? The two may coexist but it would be better if we chose.

Alastair McGibbon, Surete: What are the social policy and military issues of cyberwar? Whether it’s a tool used by nations and others, there is a threat.

Tim Scully, Stratsec/BAE: Industry is the force to make a difference in cyber security in Australia. Government has a critical role but it can’t do what needs to be done. And it’s time to wrest cyber security from techies.

Brendan Griffin, Bank of Queensland:

We need the internet to be consistent and have integrity, and the recent events of the RSA breach bring that into question. What components of the internet infrastructure can we continue to rely on or where do we start to lose that trust?

Darren Pauli, SC Magazine: I’d like to be personally convinced that cyberwar is real or is it a fallacy?