Six years ago I wrote a thriller, “Death Ground”*. Set in a dystopian 2019, the manuscript’s protagonist was Jeff Strangford, a burnt out undercover operative who infiltrates an eco-terrorist cell. This turns out to be an al-Qaeda front operation run by a renegade but hot Frenchwoman. Along the way Strangford is aided by a gifted hacker called Alec Sulco, erstwhile member of a clandestine cyberwarfare team known as “Spectre Force”…
“Spectre was a black ops outfit, an outlandish mishmash of hackers, programmers, cryptographers, financial analysts, safe-breakers and demolitions experts – young whizz-kids and criminals who could spy and skirmish in cyberspace, hack into a satellite, a corporate database or the computer system of a stock exchange, and take down a country’s grid or a city’s water supply in a matter of hours.”
No publisher would touch “Death Ground”. For years I wondered why. Now perhaps I’m starting to get the picture. The UK government has announced that it plans to set up an Office of Cyber Security and a Cyber Security Operations Centre, to counter cyber-attacks made by hostile regimes, terrorists and criminals. Cyber security minister Lord West said that the government is turning for help to former illegal hackers…
“You need youngsters who are deep into this stuff… If they have been slightly naughty boys, very often they really enjoy stopping other naughty boys.”
Good idea that, hiring naughty boys (and girls). Who better to catch poachers than other poachers? But hackers + government bureaucracy doesn’t sound like a good match. What’s the bet that lone wolf hackers would not thrive in a regimented bureaucracy run by managers and HR advisers. That sounds like North Korea’s approach to cyber-war.
The Russians and the Chinese appear to run a decentralized model, outsourcing cyber-war to shadowy civilian groups. The advantages of this approach include deniability, flexibility, access to the latest tactics and weapons, and being able to draw on the best talent available (hackers, IT workers, online gamers). As John Robb at Global Guerrillas has noted…
“Given the rapid decay/turnover in skills, high rates of innovation, high compensation, and the value of real-world expertise, the best people for cyberwarfare don’t work (nor will they ever) in the government. The best you can do is rent/entice them for a while.”
So, rather than set-up a hierarchical government unit, a better strategy for countering cyber-attack could be to form a flat network of experts, set a general operational framework, give people the resources they need, then let them to go for it. And keep the managers and the HR people well away.
Oh, and if you hear the name “Spectre Force” mentioned anywhere, well, you’ll know why my promising career as a writer was nipped in the bud.
* Sun-tzu: “Where without a desperate struggle, we perish. That is death ground”.
