International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2019/2020 | Page 50

A (Guided) Tour of the Digital Wild West
and shoot back. Experts describe this in the language of trench warfare, like something
akin to a close-quarter knife-fight (Report by the Office of the US Director
of National Intelligence, May 2018). The following are three current examples of
strategic cyberattacks:
• Federal Government of the United States, Office of Personnel Management:
every federal employee has a digital dossier (Standard Form 86), which contains
details about their entire life: a list of every foreigner they have come
into contact with since childhood, parents, partner(s), children, family, anyone
with whom the person concerned has any association at all, licit or otherwise,
and their medical and financial profile. In June 2015, the OPM announced
that twenty-one million (that’s right, million) of these SF86 dossiers had been
hacked. By whom? Umm, ... the Chinese, maybe?
• August 2017, Saudi Arabia: a cyberattack on a petrochemical plant belonging
to a large international company closed down operations using a minor “bug.”
Targeting the controls of the plant’s key functions, this sophisticated digital
attack required specialist knowledge of its design and layout. The idea was not
to sabotage the plant, but to make it explode, as happened in the 1984 Bhopal
disaster. The design of the plant (by Schneider Electric) is similar to that
of some eighteen thousand others around the world (nuclear, petrochemical,
water treatment, gas, industrial chemicals, and so on).
• A software system known as ECDIS (Electronic Chart Display), commonly
used in commercial shipping, (cargo vessels, tankers, and so on) can, via remote
hacking, be made to distort a boat’s size and position on neighboring
vessels’ GPS tracking systems by up to 300 meters. ECDIS then triggers the
alarm-collision feature of the Automatic Identification System. Interference of
this kind, applied to several ships in close proximity, can quickly paralyze any
confined area of water, such as the English Channel.
Hackers and Hacking: Present and Future
Our virtual world, whether it is a company information system,
an industrial network, or very simply your family computer, has
never been so vulnerable, attacked on all sides without any sign of
the problem being solved. (Interview with a cybersecurity expert,
SDBR, April 3 2018)
The Cause of the Disaster: The NSA
From 2016 onward, Tailored Access Operations (TAO), the NSA’s most secret division,
responsible for all offensive/intrusive aspects of target information systems,
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