A Cyberwar In The Making?

A Cyberwar In The Making?

By Ed Kociela

The talking heads on the television screen were babbling in their semi-incoherent state about the fallout from the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

They painted a David and Goliath scenario, which isn’t totally true, as they talked about troops moving to topple the Ukrainian government.

They talked about suitable NATO and Western responses to the attack and the reasons why it may have occurred.

The rambling went on and on, as it often does on the news channels, as one expert locked horns with another in fruitless discussion.

But, from the din of bloviating came a simple statement from somebody who had worked for United States intelligence agencies in the past, one of those retirees trying to boost his Social Security payments with a little TV consultation money.

His line was about how there was concern about Russia launching a cyberwar. In a cyberwar, there would be no killing, no leveled cities, no troop movements, just the destruction of intellectual and proprietary property. Naturally, his concerns were for the defense systems and the military-industrial complex, where secrets are deeply buried in a cacophony of classified documentation, warning that sophisticated Russian hackers could go deep and uncover what’s up with our state of the art weaponry and planning.

It’s laughable to think that Russian intelligence officers would wait until now to mine that field, especially since we know their capabilities and intent. I mean, all we have to do is remember the collusion that the Russians had with Donald Trump in 2016 to influence the election. It’s spy versus spy work, something that goes back far beyond modern history and is executed with all sorts of levels of sophistication and success.

To think that Russians have not explored diving deeply into Western classified information until this invasion is downright stupid.

What the talking heads neglected, however, is a more dangerous form of cyberwar, one that would shake things up more than finding plans for our most top-secret projects, a form of cyberwar that would impact you, me, and everybody we know and love; an attack on our social media platforms.

What would happen if you went to log in to Facebook and it wasn’t there?

What if you went to research something on Google and it wasn’t there?

What would happen if you punched into YouTube and it wasn’t there?

Google processes 8.5 billion searches per day globally according to a report in Internet Live Stats. That works out to nearly 100,000 searches every second.

That does not include other Google services, such as Gmail, Google News, Google Shopping, and its function as a platform for videos and images.

Facebook is the world’s largest social media platform with 2.91 billion monthly active users globally. Approximately 160 million businesses use the Meta apps — Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp — every month and 1.3 billion people are active Facebook Messenger customers. The social media giant claims 71,970 full-time employees and billions in revenue.

YouTube is the second-largest search engine behind Google and fetches 2.3 billion users who tune in at least once a month.

What would happen if you hit the button and there was no YouTube, Google, or Facebook? Utter chaos on personal and professional levels.

As we have learned, particularly during the era of COVID-19, the cyber world is invaluable. It kept families forced into isolation and quarantine, together, offering a means to see grandma and grandpa and Uncle Joe. It is equally important to realize that the pandemic taught us that even during the pandemic spread, we could still function in a practical sense. Countless people have been working from their homes the past couple of years and most schools have presented classes through cyberspace. It may be much different than old school education and traditional workspaces, but it worked. In fact, I would wager quite a bit of money that many businesses that unleashed their workers and allowed them to work from home when the pandemic hit have found that employee productivity has actually gone up while overhead took a significant drop. It translated into good news for the environment as fossil fuel use dropped dramatically, coal consumption plummeted, and greenhouse gas emissions have abated, meaning we have stretched our fuel supplies and cleaned up our air and water significantly by not cramming our skies, roads, freeways, and rail transports.

So, all we need to keep America up and running is good, reliable internet service. As long as the vital bit of infrastructure remains intact, we can figure out how to best use it to conduct our daily business. Interfere with that grid and it all collapses rather quickly. That’s why any infrastructure bills introduced in Congress must include provisions for further development of our internet systems to get even faster, more reliable speeds and a maintenance program to ensure that we all remain plugged in at minimal cost.

We all get frustrated by the misinformation that seems to permeate the internet these days, but that only means we have to dig deeper, learn more, and separate fact from fiction, something we should be doing regularly already to sift out the bias and poisoned lies. Do your due diligence and it will all be just fine.

And, I agree with the intelligence community that we need to fiercely protect our military and political secrets. I agree that we need protection from rogue hackers who would shatter our personal privacy bubbles and steal our vital information. Again, though, it is up to us to be vigilant about such things.

But, the most important thing we can do is keep the social media platforms, like ‘em or hate ‘em, up and running because that is how America and the rest of the world communicates, enhancing the concept that we are all part of a global community that is increasingly dependent on the various segments of planetary culture, custom, and finance. Take it away and you have chaos as people scramble to reach out to each other.

I mean, My God, we might have to dial-up phone numbers and have real conversations, as unseemly as that may be.

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