It is nothing new for adversaries to copy and steal each other’s weapons but recent revelations from Symantec and The New York Times suggest this problem is much bigger with cyber weapons. US hacking tools have gone astray before, most notoriously when a mysterious group called Shadow Brokers repeatedly released National Security Agency code for hackers around the globe to use in attacks like WannaCry. Now cybersecurity analysts at Symantec have found evidence that hackers working for China’s Ministry of State Security were using NSA-built cyber weapons “at least a year prior to the Shadow Brokers leak.”
The solution is to make cyber weapons tamper resistant, which means their code cannot be determined without proper encryption, or the code rewrites itself after use, ‘duding’ the weapon.” But even self-destructing code doesn’t guarantee a target of our cyber weapons can’t copy them. They will still run the risk of being detected and characterised by a defensive system before the tamper resistant features activate.”Clever techniques, like malware that encrypts and/or deletes itself, can reduce the risk that the target can copy weapons used against it. But part of the problem is inherent to the nature of cyber warfare, which may require the US to think very differently about this new form of conflict. To copy a cyber weapon, all you have to do is see it, because the weapon itself is made of information. That makes copycat cyber weapons extremely hard to stop. Even if the code is encrypted, even if it erases itself after its attack, it has to be executed on the target’s computer in order to affect it.
https://www.cybersecurityintelligence.com/blog/the-us-cant-stop-china-copying-its-cyber-weapons-4307.html
FURTHER READING: Cyber Threats And Nuclear Weapons Systems
The solution is to make cyber weapons tamper resistant, which means their code cannot be determined without proper encryption, or the code rewrites itself after use, ‘duding’ the weapon.” But even self-destructing code doesn’t guarantee a target of our cyber weapons can’t copy them. They will still run the risk of being detected and characterised by a defensive system before the tamper resistant features activate.”Clever techniques, like malware that encrypts and/or deletes itself, can reduce the risk that the target can copy weapons used against it. But part of the problem is inherent to the nature of cyber warfare, which may require the US to think very differently about this new form of conflict. To copy a cyber weapon, all you have to do is see it, because the weapon itself is made of information. That makes copycat cyber weapons extremely hard to stop. Even if the code is encrypted, even if it erases itself after its attack, it has to be executed on the target’s computer in order to affect it.
https://www.cybersecurityintelligence.com/blog/the-us-cant-stop-china-copying-its-cyber-weapons-4307.html
FURTHER READING: Cyber Threats And Nuclear Weapons Systems
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