US and China Held Secret Cyber Wargames

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.'"

SlowNewsDay

[LostCluster]

What we have here is a pen-and-paper exercise between two groups of bigwigs where there were asked a few questions about what they would do, and we have no idea if they answered truly or not. What is this story doing here? We must not have anything to talk about today.

Why would your Critical Systems be Online?

[dryriver]

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? 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).

Re:SlowNewsDay

[mlts]

I would disagree. The more communication the US has with China, and the more diplomatic friction is handled by other methods, especially in the computer intrusion department, the less chance there would be of a Sino-American war. Trust me, if people thought the Middle East was bad, it would be nothing compared to the Pacific Rim destabilizing.

The good thing is that both the US and China want to survive, and are more interested in keeping their cities and next generations intact than blind ideology. Neither nation is interested in a war with the other.

If the pissing contests are sorted out via wargames or a 2x2 Arena team in WoW, all the better. Better that than ICBMs.