Thursday, August 12, 2021

Opportunity Knocks

It's kind of funny that China has built a huge complex for cyber warfare.

This Chinese project is as much for defense as offense:

Over the last two years all the attention focused on a virus research center in Wuhan, China while not noticing the recent completion of a new Cyber War facility, the huge National Cybersecurity Talent and Innovation Base. This 38 square kilometer (15 square miles) complex had been under construction since 2017 and consolidates dozens of military and civilian Cyber War organizations into one place, which is called the NCC (National Cybersecuity Center) for short and includes ten separate Cyber War and Cyber Security operations in one place. This is part of an effort to create a center for innovation as well as university level education programs for officers and civilians.

As I've long argued, if cyber is a domain in warfare we should not overlook the fact that the computers and people who wage that war live in the real world domain:

In the past I've noted that we can't get so caught up in the mystique of cyber-warfare that we forget that a JDAM dropped on an office building filled with enemy hackers is probably a more straightforward way of dealing with their offensive efforts than equivalent hacking back at them.

If cyber-attacks are acts of war, we are not restricted to symmetrical acts of war in response. As Israel demonstrated.

So if China wants to create a target-rich environment for us, I say we exploit that.

And as the initial post notes, the Chinese may not like what they get from this effort.