Cybersecurity and COVID-19
OVER the past couple of years, someone has been probing the defences of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet.
These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down.
No-one knows who is doing this, but it feels like a large nation state.
First, a brief background. If you want to take a network off the Internet, the easiest way to do it is with a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS).
Like the name says, this is an attack designed to prevent legitimate users from getting to the site. There are subtleties, but basically it means blasting so much data at the site that it’s overwhelmed.
These attacks are not new: hackers do this to sites they don’t like, and criminals have done it as a method of extortion.
There is an entire industry, with an arsenal of technologies, devoted to DDoS defense.
But largely it’s a matter of bandwidth. If the attacker has a bigger pipe of data than the defender has, the attacker wins.
Unfortunately, in the Pacific we are landing submarine fibre optic cables for multiple companies without some of the protection of international laws.
By the end of 2022 we estimate most of the Pacific island nations will have broadband international gateways – basically 10-lane highways for Internet access (my analogy!)
Major companies that provide the basic infrastructure that makes the Internet work have seen an increase in DDoS attacks against them since mid-2018. Moreover, they have seen a certain profile of attacks.
These attacks are significantly larger than the ones they’re used to seeing. They last longer. They’re more sophisticated.
And they look like probing. At a point in time it would start at a moderate level point and continue. And so on, along those lines, as if the attacker were looking for the exact point of failure.
The attacks are also configured in such a way as to see what an international gateway’s total defenses are. There are many different ways to launch a DDoS attacks.
The more attack vectors you employ simultaneously, the more different defenses the defender has to counter with. Multiple vectors are being used. Basically you’re forced to demonstrate your defense capabilities for the attacker.
This all is consistent with what Verisign is reporting. Verisign is the registrar for many popular top-level Internet domains, like .com and .net. If it goes down, there’s a global blackout of all websites and e-mail addresses in the most common top-level domains. Every quarter, Verisign publishes a DDoS trends report.
There’s more – there seems to be a variety of probing attacks in addition to the DDoS attacks: testing the ability to manipulate Internet addresses and routes, seeing how long it takes the defenders to respond, and so on.
The effectiveness of these persistent probes points to state actors. It feels like a nation’s military cybercommand trying to calibrate its weaponry in the case of cyberwar. It reminds me of the U.S.’s Cold War program of flying high-altitude planes over the Soviet Union to force their air-defense systems to turn on, to map their capabilities.
What can we do about this? Nothing, really. We don’t know where the attacks come from. I suspect the NSA, which has more surveillance in the Internet backbone than everyone else combined, probably has a better idea, but unless the U.S. decides to make an international incident over this, we won’t see any attribution.
But this is happening. And people should know.
Into our last quarter of a year that pandemic has changed all visions of normalcy, many of us have been feeling a sense of unease that goes beyond anxiety or distress. It’s a nameless feeling that somehow makes it hard to go on with even the nice things we regularly do.
What’s blocking our everyday routines is not the anxiety of lockdown adjustments, or the worries about ourselves and our loved ones — real though those worries are. It isn’t even the sense that, if we’re really honest with ourselves, much of what we do is pretty self-indulgent when held up against the urgency of a global pandemic.
It is something more troubling and harder to name: an uncertainty about why we would go on doing much of what for years we’d taken for granted as inherently valuable.
What we are confronting is something many writers in the pandemic have approached from varying angles: a restless distraction that stems not just from not knowing when it will all end, but also from not knowing what that end will look like. Perhaps the sharpest insight into this feeling has come from J. Zecher, a historian of religion, who linked it to the forgotten Christian term: acedia.
What could this particular form of melancholy mean in an urgent global crisis? On the face of it, all of us care very much about the health risks to those we know and don’t know. Yet lurking alongside such immediate cares is a sense of dislocation that somehow interferes with how we care.
Ilai
Our present relations to people and things are, in this deep way, futureoriented. Symphonies are written, buildings built, children conceived in the present, but always with a future in mind. What happens to our ethical bearings when we start to lose our grip on that future?
It’s here, moving back to the particular features of the global pandemic, that we see more clearly what drives the restlessness and dislocation so many have been feeling. The source of our current acedia is not the literal loss of a future; even the most pessimistic scenarios surrounding COVID-19 have our species surviving. The dislocation is more subtle: a disruption in pretty much every future frame of reference on which just going on in the present relies.
We don’t know how the economy will look, how social life will go on, how our home routines will be changed, how work will be organized, how universities or the arts or local commerce will survive.
What unsettles us is not only fear of change. It’s that, if we can no longer trust in the future, many things become irrelevant, retrospectively pointless. And by that we mean from the perspective of a future whose basic shape we can no longer take for granted. This fundamentally disrupts how we weigh the value of what we are doing right now. It becomes especially hard under these conditions to hold on to the value in activities that, by their very nature, are future-directed, such as education or institution-building. That’s today’s acedia.
Our solidarity must remain in the Sovereignty of our God and our Nation – wisely placed on the Fijian National Coat of Arms – ‘Rerevaka na Kalou ka Doka Na Tui’. We must choose to face the uncertainty together across political and cultural lines - as families, communities, religions, nations and a global humanity. As always, have a blessed weekend and stay safe.
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