full-disclosure - Cyber War or just Cyber Protest?

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Message-ID: <4b6ee9310901141114g37666195l425f7caa696a0e33@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2009 19:14:20 +0000
From: andrew.wallace <andrew.wallace@...ketmail.com>
To: full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk
Subject: Cyber War or just Cyber Protest?

If "cyber war" is just web site defacement then I don't think we ever
need to take "cyber war" too seriously.

It seems to me that "cyber war" just means protesters protesting and
no actual cyber war is there, as a cyber war would mean two sides
fighting, although two sides aren't fighting in "cyber" its all
one-way script kid web defacement, not real war in any sense.

Two sides fighting, a government and some other entity and the
internet stuck in the middle, now that would mean "cyber war", there
has been no cyber war and is unlikely to be one.

If people are marching in London today in the streets against the
Israel-Gaza conflict is that called "war"? Of course not, so why are
the media so quick to call protesting on-line, a war? [1]

What it really is, is folks protesting... a cyber protest, not a war.

Why are we using the wrong words to describe stuff? It's not even the
media, it was Gary Warner on a web log. [2]

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7809656.stm

[2] http://garwarner.blogspot.com/2008/12/muslim-hackers-declare-cyberwar-on.html

We as a community should be cautious about using the wrong words to
describe stuff, because the media take influence from us guys on
mailing lists and blogs and at security conferences, so its important
we use "cyber protest" when script kids deface some web sites.

To put the right angle on this, it's unlikely to be new people doing
the defacements, its likely to be script kids who were defacers
anyway, and just change their political message to go with *whatever
the current climate is*.

Tomorrow the same folks will be defacing with a new message, they
don't care *really* about the message, defacers will find any reason
to deface.

It's unlikely the Israel-Gaza conflict defacers were only sprung into
action because of what is going on in the world, they would be
defacing anyway and looking for any excuse to do so.

Let's be careful from now on I don't like to see the wrong buzzwords
used and i'm sure Gadi doesn't either.

If Hamas cyber attacked Israel and Israel had a cyber response, then
that would be cyber war. This is not cyber war folks, this is a cyber
protest those kids are doing, they are unlikely to be connected with
anything thats going on and were web defacers anyway with a different
defacement message the day before.

Please I hope we as security experts know the difference.

I wrote this Email just incase because i'm sick of certain buzzwords
like cyber war when there isn't a cyber war.

When the day comes that a government and another entity is two-way
cyber fighting and say for instance critical national infrastructure
is affected then you can talk about cyber war, until then please
describe web site defacers as "cyber protest".

A cyber war is two-way fighting, one-way fighting is not a war!

And to clarify, a bunch of kids defacing a web site and you applying a
patch afterwards is not classed as two-way fighting and cannot be
considered "cyber war" either.

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