U.S. Cyber Command: Hastening the End of the Internet as We Know It

This morning David Sanger and Julian Barnes review U.S. cyber-warfare capabilities in "The Urgent Search for a Cyber Silver Bullet Against Iran":

The question circulating now through the White House, the Pentagon and Cyber Command’s operations room is whether it is possible to send a strong message of deterrence with a cyberattack without doing so much damage that it would prompt an even larger Iranian counterstrike.

[snip]

In war games — essentially online simulations — held before the attack on the Saudi oil fields, officials have tried to figure out how Iran’s increasingly skillful “cyber corps” would respond to an American cyberattack. These Iranian fighters have already racked up a significant record: wiping out 30,000 computers at Saudi Aramco, freezing operations at American banks with a “denial of service” attack, and crippling a Las Vegas casino. Last year, they began to study the ins and outs of election interference, according to private experts and government studies of the 2018 midterms.

When General Nakasone was nominated for his job, he acknowledged that one of the biggest problems facing Cyber Command was that it had not cracked the deterrence problem. Nations that are attacking the United States via cyber “do not think much will happen to them,” he told Senator Dan Sullivan, Republican of Alaska. “They don’t fear us.”

In his first 18 months in office, General Nakasone has raced to bolster Cyber Command’s authority to act preemptively — and its preparations to respond to attacks. New, classified directives given to him by Mr. Trump, and built upon by Congress, allow Cyber Command to place “implants” of malicious software inside foreign networks without lengthy approval processes that run up to the president. Congress has called such efforts part of “traditional military authority.” 

Iran has reportedly been a major target — no surprise, since General Nakasone was a key player in designing a plan called “Nitro Zeus” to shut down Tehran and other Iranian cities in the event of a war. The idea was to put together an attack so devastating that Iran might surrender without a shot being fired.

We already know from the Snowden revelations that the U.S. has booby traps in the energy grid of close ally Japan. And we got an idea from Venezuela this year what it looks like when those booby traps go off (interestingly, Sanger and Barnes make no mention of the largest power outage in Venezuelan history). So Nitro Zeus should not be a surprise to us.

What should also not come as a surprise to us is the disappearance of the internet as we now it following significant hostilities between the U.S. and Iran or the U.S.and China or the U.S. and Russia.