… By early 2007, however, two senior officials with experience and faith
in the power of cyber-warfare to discretely target an adversary stepped
into top military and intelligence posts. Mike McConnell, a former
director of the National Security Agency, took over as director of
national intelligence in February of that year. And only weeks earlier,
Army Gen. David Petraeus became the commander of all allied forces in
Iraq. McConnell, who presented the request to Bush in the May 2007 Oval
Office meeting, had established the first information warfare center at
the NSA in the mid-1990s. Petraeus, a devotee of counterinsurgency
doctrine, believed that cyberwar would play a crucial role in the
strategy he had planned as part of the surge. In September 2007, the
general told Congress, “This war is not only being fought on the ground
in Iraq but also in cyberspace.”
China blocks U.S. from cyber warfare – Washington Times … Sounds like the Chinese Gov won’t be using Windows as there operating system…
The secure operating system, known as Kylin, was disclosed to Congress during recent hearings that provided new details on how China’s government is preparing to wage cyberwarfare with the United States.
“We are in the early stages of a cyber arms race and need to respond accordingly,” said Kevin G. Coleman, a private security specialist who advises the government on cybersecurity. He discussed Kylin during a hearing of the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission on April 30.
The deployment of Kylin is significant, Mr. Coleman said, because the system has “hardened” key Chinese servers. U.S. offensive cyberwar capabilities have been focused on getting into Chinese government and military computers outfitted with less secure operating systems like those made by Microsoft Corp.
“This action also made our offensive cybercapabilities ineffective against them, given the cyberweapons were designed to be used against Linux, UNIX and Windows,” he said.
In Cyberweapons Race, Questions Linger Over U.S. Offensive Capability – NYTimes.com a good backgrounder about US Gov’s stepping up of digital defences from April 27 2009.
The most exotic innovations under consideration would enable a Pentagon programmer to surreptitiously enter a computer server in Russia or China, for example, and destroy a “botnet” — a potentially destructive program that commandeers infected machines into a vast network that can be clandestinely controlled — before it could be unleashed in the United States.
Or American intelligence agencies could activate malicious code that is secretly embedded on computer chips when they are manufactured, enabling the United States to take command of an enemy’s computers by remote control over the Internet. That, of course, is exactly the kind of attack officials fear could be launched on American targets, often through Chinese-made chips or computer servers.
So far, however, there are no broad authorizations for American forces to engage in cyberwar. The invasion of the Qaeda computer in Iraq several years ago and the covert activity in Iran were each individually authorized by Mr. Bush. When he issued a set of classified presidential orders in January 2008 to organize and improve America’s online defenses, the administration could not agree on how to write the authorization.
A principal architect of that order said the issue had been passed on to the next president, in part because of the complexities of cyberwar operations that, by necessity, would most likely be conducted on both domestic and foreign Internet sites. After the controversy surrounding domestic spying, Mr. Bush’s aides concluded, the Bush White House did not have the credibility or the political capital to deal with the subject.
