Posted Sept. 15, 2013
If current progress toward Syria turning over its chemical weapons ultimately unravels and the U.S. ultimately launches a military strike, it can do so with impunity in terms of Syria’s ability to retaliate kinetically. It doesn’t have the ability to reach any American assets except, possibly, the naval ships nearby.
But in the cyber world, Syria’s ability to attack is more difficult to assess. However, the Syrian Electronic Army, a pro-Assad regime group of hackers that may in fact be directed by President Bashar al-Assad’s administration, has already said it will retaliate if the U.S. launches an air strike.
“It’s like when Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States. We’re sort of ignoring the fact that people have affirmatively said, ‘We’re going to hit you,’” said Paul Rosenzweig, a former deputy assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security and cybersecurity expert. “How good they (the Syrian Electronic Army) are is an open question.”
In August, the SEA caused The New York Times’ website to go down. It also has hit other Western media organizations, either by hitting their websites or seizing their Twitter feeds. Among those targeted have been The Washington Post, CBS News, the Associated Press and National Public Radio.
Washington Post reporter Max Fisher wrote on Aug. 27 that SEA members are more likely pranksters than Syrian government-aligned hackers. Rosenzweig, who also is a lecturer at the Medill School of Journalism and a contributor to Medill National Security Zone, said that it is not clear how much influence Assad’s government has on the group, but it could be more significant.
He also said the attack on the Times’ website was more sophisticated than a simple “denial of service” attack in which hackers flood a website so legitimate traffic can’t get in, but the underlying data is not destroyed.
SEA instead hacked into the domain name register and changed the Internet Protocol addresses so that when a user typed “nytimes.com” he would go to an IP address controlled by “bad guys in Syria.”
The U.S. is fairly vulnerable to cyberattack, whether from Syria or other state or non-state actors.
“It’s more than a theoretical worry,” said Rosenzweig. A cyberattack could be anything from “mischief to vandalism to significant damage.”
National Security Agency Chief Keith Alexander has said the agency is preparing for both offensive and defensive action if the U.S. is subjected to a cyberattack.
“You can assume that offensively they’re trying to figure out whom to take out . . . they could be planning an offensive attack,” Rosenzweig said.
Rosenzweig said that if he were in Alexander’s shoes, he would have developed intelligence about how attacks might occur and be looking for the
warning signs that such attacks were imminent.
“If I knew where some of their command and control servers were, I’d be preparing to disrupt, degrade and disable them,” he said. “And I’d be working with critical infrastructure to push as much information about the SEA or other enemy as possible out to (places like) the New York Stock Exchange and any other targets.
“I’d also be worrying a little.”
Ellen Shearer is co-director of the National Security Journalism Initiative, as well as the William F. Thomas Professor of the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. She teaches in the school’s Washington Program. Before joining the Medill faculty, she was a senior editor at New York Newsday, a consulting editor at Newhouse News Service, marketing executive at Reuters, and held positions as senior executive, bureau chief and reporter at United Press International.
