Going to cyberwar in work pants

Image from Pixabay

Doing odd jobs is not really my hobby, but sometimes it has to be done, right? And when I do get to work, I wear trousers that I was given 36 years ago as a conscript. Indestructible, that stuff. And the fact that I still fit into them, perhaps says something about me too…

Do you know what my work pants have in common with the internet? There are two points of similarity: first, the internet is also of military origin, and second, it is designed to be at least as indestructible as these combat pants.

The internet started in 1969 (!) under the name ARPANET as a project of the American Department of Defense. There was a need for a robust network that would not be dependent on a central system. This desire resulted in a distributed system, so that a bomb on one server (it was the middle of the Cold War at the time) would not bring down the whole thing. They have succeeded quite well: I cannot remember the internet as a whole ever going down. Incidentally, that did happen locally in 2019 on the Tonga Islands, after a break in the fiber optic cable to New Zealand, says Wikipedia. But that is an example of how it should not be done: the idea behind robustness is that, when a connection fails, the data will find another route to its destination. If you are an island and are connected to the rest of the world via a single cable, then you have a single point of failure in your system - and that is at odds with the philosophy behind the internet.

Although the Netherlands is not an island, our internet is not as invulnerable as you would like. Almost all of our international traffic runs via one node, the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX). If that goes down, there are still other connections to the outside world, but they could become overloaded. Fortunately, AMS-IX is spread over multiple locations, so the chance that the node will fail completely is not that great. In the Netherlands, an awful lot happens on the internet: office workers can work from home, we shop like crazy and we are in contact with the rest of the world via social media. You don't want to think about this being disrupted for more than ten minutes, do you?

The NATO Secretary General of informed us this week that we must mentally prepare ourselves for war. I don't know how that came across to you, but Mark Rutte's statement hit me hard. War is something from from the era of my parents and is taking place elsewhere in the world in our time. Admittedly, Ukraine is less than fifteen hundred kilometres from my house, but it can't get any closer, can it? Then I'll just recall the book There's a War Going On But No One Can See It by Huib Modderkolk. A digital war probably wasn’t on top of Rutte’s mind, but in fact it has been raging for years. The intelligence services often mention the illustrious quartet of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea when it comes to state actors who attack us. Their goals are espionage, money, disruption, sabotage and influence. Rutte advocates tanks and fighter jets, but hopefully someone will whisper in his ear that digital defence must be a top priority. In the past, you had won a war if you controlled the airspace. Today, control over cyberspace is at least as important. A secure digital infrastructure is much less tangible than Leopards and F35s – I have yet to see the first camouflaged router. Hopefully this invisibility does not lead to a lack of attention.

The label on my work pants bears the name H. van Puijenbroek. This turns out to be a textile manufacturer that has been a regular supplier to our armed forces since 1925. It also turns out that the trousers are being offered for sale for €49 ($51), as a “rare find”. And if only I hadn’t given away the matching jackets: they are being offered for almost two hundred euros ($210). I would have sold them now and put the money in my war chest. Because due to the geopolitical threats, banks and ministers advise us to have some cash at home*. Because if “they” paralyze things here and we can no longer use our debit card, we still want to eat. Fortunately, most supermarkets still accept physical money as a means of exchange.

*: For some international context: people in the Netherlands heavily rely on their debit cards. Cash is not that common anymore.

 

And in the big bad world…

• NATO will get a new cyber center in 2028.
• espionage sometimes makes the news.
• Google has achieved a milestone in quantum computing.
• The cloud has been suffering from outages lately, especially Microsoft's.
• social media also suffered from outages this week.
• Microsoft Azure's multi-factor authentication could easily be bypassed.
• not all cybercriminals are trustworthy.
• Firefox is ditching a privacy setting because it allegedly doesn't work.
• Your iPhone may soon be able to remove location data from photos you share.
• The Dutch intelligence services have published a threat analysis on artificial intelligence. [DUTCH]