Crossroads Blog | Institute National Security and Counterterrorism

cyber attack, international law, warfare, wikileaks

Cyber roundup (9/12): WCIT hits back, Korea-US cyber drills, Apple Device IDs, and WikiLeaks is losing it

Slow day in news, but a few articles of interest . . .

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On September 11th, 2012, David McAuley wrote for Bloomberg BNA on his recent interview with International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Secretary-General Dr. Hamadoun I. Toure.  There’s a lot of controversy over whether the ITU, backed by countries like China and Russia, will make a play for internet governance at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT).  The U.S. response has been very critical, with Congressional resolutions flying all over the place.

Toure thinks these criticisms are too dramatic, telling McAuley that the WCIT “has nothing to do with [internet] Governance” but rather with issues like roaming charges and data security.  If internet governance is concerned with IANA and ICANN, then Toure believes that “[t]hese are issues that we’re not talking about at all . . . [w]e’re not pushing that, we don’t need to.”

Take that for what it’s worth.  Check out the rest of the article for more of the interview.

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The Korea Times reported on new S. Korea-U.S. joint exercises that will “train professionals to guard against growing threats of cyber attack from North Korea.”  Apparently the U.S. and S. Korea already conducted “basic cyber warfare operations” during last month’s war games.

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Business Insider’s Geoffrey Ingersoll reported the following:

A Japanese military panel [has] ruled to define cyberspace as ‘a ‘territory’ where various activities such as information gathering, attack, and defence occur, on the same way as land, sea, air and space.

Though this was a non-binding statement, Ingersoll thought its implications were “astounding” because it “cast[s] Americans and Israeli digital attacks on Iran as acts of war.”

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Andy Greenberg wrote for Forbes and questioned whether WikiLeaks has gone off the deep end.  WikiLeaks apparently put out a very bizzare tweet where it linked the Benghazi embassy violence to the U.K. threat to arrest Assange.  Even WikiLeaks supporters were flabbergasted.

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Wired’s Kim Zetter on how Anon did not get all those Apple Device IDs from the FBI, but rather, from “the hack of a little-known app development company in Florida.”

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