US and China Held Secret Cyber Wargames 71
judgecorp writes "Despite the accusations that have flown both ways between the countries, the US and China have co-operated in wargames, held in secret in Beijing and Washington, designed to head off escalations in hostilities. From the article: 'During the first exercise, both sides had to describe what they would do if they were attacked by a sophisticated computer virus, such as Stuxnet, which disabled centrifuges in Iran's nuclear program. In the second, they had to describe their reaction if the attack was known to have been launched from the other side.'"
Re:Why would your Critical Systems be Online? (Score:4, Informative)
For Cyberwarfare to be able happen to begin with, critical IT systems on both sides would have to be connected to the Internet, right? Question: Why are those critical IT systems connected-to/reachable by Internet to begin with? Wouldn't you keep those systems AWAY from the Internet, and connect them together using some custom-laid fiberoptic WAN or something?
Systems communicate across the country and sometimes across the world, and their location might be dynamic. It's not possible/practical to have custom fiber everywhere.
Wouldn't you - for security's sake - maybe use custom CPUs/OSs on those systems that aren't even available on the free market? (i.e. having Intel or AMD or ARM manufacture a few thousand non-X86 compatible custom CPUs for you... running a custom-flavour of Linux on them that isn't compatible with the original Linux at all).
It's an almost certainty that there are industrial and foreign spies at Intel, AMD, and nearly every major tech company in the US. And even if that weren't the case, foreign countries have ways of getting people to cooperate, especially when members of their family live abroad. Not sure it's as simple as you think.