Ron Deibert And Rafal Rohozinski
March 31, 2011
In the aftermath of the revolution that brought down Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, protesters burst into the building that housed the state security services and combed through thousands of documents left by the departing regime. Among the files listing paid informants, tortured confessions and acts of secret manipulation was one rather exceptional document: a contract from an obscure German firm selling cyberwar software to the Egyptian regime. The document, quickly posted on the Internet, provided a detailed glimpse inside the black arts of today’s world of electronic warfare.
For those who study the geopolitics of cyberspace, the revelation was hardly surprising. There’s an arms race in cyberspace, and a massively exploding new cyber-industrial complex that serves it. The German firm is but one small manifestation.
It has become a truism to say that the offence has the advantage over the defence in cyber conflicts. Attack tools are cheap and widely available. Attackers can mount their assaults with lightning speed from anywhere on the planet to anywhere else, disguising their origins and masking responsibility.
Scholars of war and human nature have long understood that, in an offence-dominant environment such as this, the pressure is on to keep up or be left behind. Fear and insecurity increase, threats lurk everywhere, and rash decisions can lead to unexpected outcomes and chaos.
While this may sound ominous for most, for those in the defence industry, it presents an irresistible market opportunity. A new cyber military-industrial complex has exploded, estimated to be between $80 billion and $150 billion annually. Like Dwight Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex before it, this massive cyber-industrial complex is intimately connected to militarization processes in the West and, in particular, the United States. Major corporate giants that arose in the Cold War, such as Boeing and Northrop Grumman, are now repositioning themselves to service the cyber security market.