The Palestinian-Israel: cyberwar

Military Review, March-April, 2003 by Patrick D. Allen, Chris C. Demchak

When a government site goes down or is defaced, the nation might lose some face. But when a company's website is shut down, it loses revenue. Matt Krantz and Edward Iwata in a USA Today article stated, "Some businesses lose $10,000 to several million dollars a minute when networks go down.... They lose, on an average, $100,000 an hour in lost productivity." (25) Reality Research estimated that businesses worldwide stood to lose more than $1.5 trillion last year as a result of cyber assaults. (26)

Even though commercial sites have a vested interest in defending against cyber attack, the drive for cost effectiveness leads most companies to ignore their website's vulnerabilities until they are hacked. (27) Therefore, there is a need to create major incentives for businesses to be secure in cyberspace, and there should be penalties for not being secure by a specific date.

Phase 2: Rapid horizontal escalation. The Palestinian-Israeli cyber conflict broadened quickly. Four weeks into the conflict, pro-Palestinian hackers struck a U.S. website. Three weeks later, Israeli hackers struck websites in Iran and Lebanon. (28) Since Israel had more websites from which to launch a counter cyber attack than did the Palestinians, the Israeli hackers began seeking vulnerable sites outside the Palestinian National Authority and Lebanon. For example, an Israeli hacker group calling itself "the Mossad" defaced the Iranian president's website, claiming Iran was a supporter of Lebanon-based terrorist organizations.

Cyber warfare escalates horizontally and more rapidly than in standard warfare for three reasons. First, the main criteria for civilian hacker attacks appear to be vulnerability as opposed to criticality. The search for vulnerable targets expands until one is found. If government and commercial sites in the target nation are not sufficiently vulnerable, then target sites in other nations friendly to the target nation will be struck. Conversely, professional hackers in the employ of a specific nation are likely to escalate only as necessary to obtain the desired effect on the target nation.

Second, international hacker groups view the situation as one in which they can wield power without fear of retaliation. Many hackers want to show they support a cause. Since the Web includes built-in public dissemination methods, hacking into any target on the Web tends to gain some notoriety.

Third, cyber conflicts so far have been polarized, or bipolar. The more bipolar a conflict, such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, the greater the chance that it will attract volunteers to one side or the other. Each side perceives the other as having permanent allies that will always back their enemies. Therefore, the United States was declared a target with Israel shortly after the Palestinian-Israeli cyber conflict began. (29)

Traditionally, allies of a warring nation were relatively safe from military attack unless they were brought directly into the fighting. The cost of bringing a neutral nation into the fighting usually incurred at least some penalty on the nation choosing to escalate. In cyberspace, however, the cost of escalation is small for a nation, and almost nonexistent for an individual hacker. Therefore, rapid horizontal escalation will likely occur in future cyber conflicts.