Obama Ushers In the Age of Cyberwarfare

Two very, very interesting points stood out from the statements, beyond the
announcement that the American nation now has a CSO .

One is that Mr. Obama mentioned (and thus confirmed) the incident in which the security of the servers used in his electoral campaign was breached, while also providing an alphabet soup of who was involved in post-incident activities: “And we worked closely with the CIA — with the FBI and the Secret Service and hired security consultants to restore the security of our systems.”

The President of the US mentioning the CIA in this context surely raised some eyebrows, as the Agency is tasked with securing the US from the outside, basically. Is Obama telling us that the attack against his campaign servers was instigated and/or perpetrated from outside the US?

Another remark seems to provide third-party confirmation of the fact that the DoS attacks against Georgian official websites during the recent war were indeed Russia’s doing and thus the first act of overt cyber-warfare ever:

“And last year we had a glimpse of the future face of war. As Russian tanks rolled into Georgia, cyber attacks crippled Georgian government websites. “

With the establishment of an IT security office in the White House, the IT security “game” is moving, quite publicly, to the big league of national security and international politics.

It will be interesting to watch this new office in action and watch its effect on the world at large. Will the US, for instance, push for Wassenaar arrangement criteria to be changed to include IT security software and/or computer viruses as munitions?