New wars will be fought in cyberspace

There is no doubt that Twitter, Facebook and their other cousins were started with benign intent.

By Bikram Vohra (Between the Lines)

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Published: Sun 12 Jan 2020, 6:45 PM

Last updated: Sun 12 Jan 2020, 8:49 PM

With every passing day the fear of cyberwars becomes so much more real. I read a book the other day in which the author says that one day we will long for the scruffy terrorist with the used AK-47 as opposed to the intellectual terrorist who is now in our midst. He is erudite, educated, urbane, holds a responsible post in a working hierarchy and his mindset is more devious and dangerous than a thousand foot soldiers.
The gun-toting caricature of the current militant, regardless of which part of the world he is in, will be vanilla compared to what a handful of such people can do by way of tearing apart the social fabric.
It got me thinking that either the author had a fertile imagination or that society was in peril now and we are hurtling, sans geographical boundaries, into a new world where the terrorist per se is being aided and abetted by you and I thanks to our servile surrender to social media.
Take this urbane terrorist. He or she shares exactly the same priorities as the college student on the couch, texting madly to a friend. The depressed housewife making 4,752 friends across the world and feeling wanted or more meaningfully, needed. The overnight success reflects his lack of self-esteem through photos of himself on the Costa del Sol or in a first-class airline seat. Boasting of his achievements indicates that the single largest spur to becoming a slave to QWERTY in its many debasing forms is unbridled narcissism.
And with narcissism comes the blank cheque on blackmail.
In 2012, psychologists in the US produced a paper that said: Narcissism is excessive self-love, inflated self-importance and unjustified feelings of entitlement. Along with electrons, it is the primary active ingredient in the internet.
It is you. The executive sharing insider information in cryptic code confident that it cannot be broken. Hackers wearing a mantle of romance as they inveigle themselves into your lives as insidiously as HIV. In fact, there could be five legs on the evil toadstool.
The computer-savvy extremist: Texting madly, he would send his messages to create awareness, build tension, generate a daisy chain, provide knowledge to his cohorts, a knowledge that we would so unstintingly volunteer and keep updating.
The depressed housewife: Who are those lonely people, where do they come from, where do they belong? People living lives of lonely despair are perfect recruits for the 'good' fight. Eleanor Rigby has a million facsimiles and they are cannon fodder so easily led astray by blandishment and flattery, their excruciating need to be wanted. They will flock to the recruiter and his cause. Somebody 'understands' them.
The overnight success: Spewing data about himself and his wealth, he will give any half-witted terror cell leader information. The amount of information we so freely dispense in these public forums underscores an ignorance that, for the evil-doer, is pure bliss.
The executive playing the odds: He is an ideal choice for tracking and since he is already cheating and breaking the laws, what better person to befriend? So dramatically are we all brain-washed into not seeing a terrorist and a Brooks Brothers suit using his iPad to play Candy Crush, that we cannot possibly see him plotting mayhem. You better believe it, we are getting there. Besides, the inherent narcissism and the need to show off offers the clever extremist great insight into the weaknesses of his target.
Once he has hacked him, he has got him and his wealth.
Hackers - they target the ones they need for specific reasons and the lonely people, the misled and the easily swayed are all marked for mental slaughter...which could then lead to the worst-case scenarios of violence executed by self-imposed martyrdom. If law enforcement agencies of the world can hire hackers, why can't threat and coercion be used to enlist such geniuses by the cells? It is a no-brainer.
Every now and again we read of mobile phones being compromised by malware that would then access personal data, including photographs, messages, and private correspondence. I know who you are and what you wrote. So easy is it to obtain data that the image of a sacked employee carrying away his personal effects in a brown cardboard box and not being allowed to check his computer as Security marches him off is ludicrous. He probably has a hundred copies already. Up in the cloud, seeded with information.
So there is no difference between the 21st century spawning of the intellectual terrorist and the student on the couch. He can spread the message in real time. He can get funding directly or by proxy. He can recruit with consummate ease. He can sit at home over breakfast and generate a campaign over the long haul, provide a chat room for the truly deranged and by bouncing his signals and using cut-outs, he can be reasonably confident that he will not be traced.
There is no doubt that Twitter, Facebook and their other cousins were started with benign intent. To communicate with one another in a networking environment that broke the barriers of caste, colour, and creed. That turned malignant a long time ago and with every new addition to the information surge, the most benefitted are the ones with violence on their minds. Armed with cyber-weaponry (and this is no joke), this growing army will not look at suicide vests and a dozen victims, but will seek the 'pleasures' of mega-deaths.
Since we, the people, are integral to the problem, is there a solution?
There is no silver bullet.
There have been several scenarios including upgrades in surveillance, sharing of international databases and eye in the sky activity coupled with tailing suspects on the information highway. But it is a very large terrain for an unequal battle.
Unless there is some global awakening, we will feast at the banquet of consequences. At present, there is very little correlation or evidence that one can input to shore up these concerns. Why should there be? Any par hacker would have enough backdoor brooms to obliterate his tracks.
Let us make another comparison. It has been said that the Net is a good servant but a vicious master. We have rendered it so much space that even Caesar would be teed off. To say it runs our lives is an understatement. Take a corporation, a multi-national or a bank. For all such organisations, there are real risks to using social media, ranging from damaging the brand to stealing secrets, exposing proprietary information, inviting lawsuits for copyright infringement and shoveling huge sums of money into building firewalls.
The militant has no such fears. Everything falls in his favour even if it goes off track temporarily. To him, all exposure is publicity and he thrives on it. And yet, what makes it all so insidious is that he is also the head of an organisation, with a functioning hierarchy. So how can we but lose to him. We have given him all the cards.
For people at large, the biggest fear is the ability these elements are obtaining to dismantle, freeze, turn rogue or confuse the computerised grids. Malfunctioning computers can bring cities to a halt. Yes, we have all seen those movies but we cannot get away from the fact that the fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves that we let it get so far. We never realised that from petty crime and seamy chat rooms, it was a small, very small step to full-blown intimidation via the Net.
From silly little six-digit passwords being our personal security to the mountain of data processed and available, we are vulnerable. Perhaps the first step is to individually exercise caution in sharing and giving those who might harm us undue publicity by passing on their written ideology or photographs. The frightening part is we do not even know we are doing it.
Just as a slew of TV crime shows have given criminals insight into forensic medicine and made them that much wiser, we do much the same to the professional killer. We feed him the road-map to disaster. Every minute of every day. -
bikram@khaleejtimes.com


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