cbsnews | Fixing blame for cyber attacks is frustratingly difficult, partly
because originators often employ proxies, partly because attack analysis
turns up diversionary red herrings that implicate innocents. And that's
just the start of the problem.
It goes without saying by now
that cyber weapons enlarge and blur understood definitions of war. Cyber
aggressors include nation states, their private contractors, non-state
evildoers, and corporate interests. There are no norms or conventions
framing acceptable behavior in cyberspace -- the cyber version of arms
treaties. There's no playbook for proportional retaliation, nor
protocols for cooperative defensive action that join public and private
interests. (As evidence of our own cultural confusion, some called news
coverage of looted Sony data "near treason" -- as if the embarrassing email rants of studio execs are akin to nuclear launch codes.)
Any
rapid, unequivocal, on-the-record conclusion about who perpetrated what
should raise eyebrows. This is especially true with Europeans, who
harbor broad hesitation about such U.S. pronouncements after all those
keenly recalled 2003 assurances about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
Here the burden of proof is also high, and the skeptics are rightfully speaking up in greater numbers.
