UN Telecom Chief Warns Of Cyberspace Wars
The world’s next war could occur in cyberspace and could be catastrophic, warned the United Nations’ secretary-general of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) on Tuesday during the ITU’s Telecom World 2009 fair in Geneva.
"The next world war could happen in cyberspace and that would be a catastrophe. We have to make sure that all countries understand that in that war, there is no such thing as a superpower," the AFP news agency quoted Hamadoun Toure as saying.
The telecom agency chief’s remarks came as experts at the conference made a call for action to put an end to cyber attacks.
"Loss of vital networks would quickly cripple any nation, and none is immune to cyberattack," Toure said, adding that countries have become "critically dependent" on technology for finance, commerce, health care and emergency services.
"The best way to win a war is to avoid it in the first place," he cautioned.
Cyberattacks have increased in frequency as the Internet becomes increasingly more entwined with our daily lives, said experts at the conference.
These attacks include the use of "phishing" scams to obtain passwords to commit fraud and efforts by hackers to shutdown secure networks.
Individual nations have responded by strengthening their defenses.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said last Thursday that she has received approval to hire as many as 1,000 cybersecurity experts to boost the United States’ defenses against cyber threats.
South Korea also announced plans to train some 3,000 "cyber sheriffs" by next year to protect businesses following a series of attacks on government and private websites.
Warning of the magnitude of cybercrimes and attacks, Carlos Solari, vice president on central quality, security and reliability for Alcatel-Lucent, told a conference that e-commerce breaches are now numbering in the "hundreds of billions."
Estonia was one of the most well known victims in recent years, having fallen victim to a series of cyber attacks in 2007 that forced the shutdown of government websites and disrupted businesses.
Juhan Parts, Estonia’s Minister for Economic Affairs and Communications, said that "adequate international cooperation" was critical.
"Because if something happens on cyberspace… it’s a border crossing issue. We have to have horizontal cooperation globally," the AFP quoted him as saying during the conference.
Several nations have now joined forces in the International Multilateral Partnership against Cyber Threats (IMPACT), established this year to "proactively track and defend against cyberthreats."
Some 37 ITU member states have already enlisted, with another 15 nations holding advanced discussions, according to the ITU.
A significant problem is that software and web infrastructure has the same vulnerabilities today as those made twenty years ago, experts said.
"The real problem is that we’re putting on the market software that is as vulnerable as it was 20 years ago," Cristine Hoepers, general manager at Brazilian National Computer Emergency Response Team, told the AFP.
"If you see the vulnerabilities that are being exploited today, they are still the same," she said, suggesting that developers need to be trained to "design something more resilient."
"Universities are not teaching students to think about that. We need to change the workforce, we need to go to the universities… we need to start educating our professionals.”
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