In that murky world, the attacks are carefully calibrated to be well short of war. The attackers are hard to identify with certainty, and the evidence cannot be made public. The counterstrike, if there is one, is equally hard to discern and often unsatisfying. The damage is largely economic and psychological. Deterrence is hard to establish. And because there are no international treaties or norms about how to use digital weapons — indeed, no acknowledgment by the United States government that it has ever used them itself — there are no rules about how to fight this kind of conflict.
“Until now, we’ve been pretty ad hoc in figuring out what’s an annoyance and what’s an attack,” James Lewis, a cyberexpert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said last week. “If there’s a lesson from this, it’s that we’re long overdue” for a national discussion about how to respond to cyberattacks — and how to use America’s own growing, if unacknowledged, arsenal of digital weaponry…
“The N.S.A. has been trying to eavesdrop on North Korea’s government communications since the Korean War, and it’s reasonable to assume that its analysts are in pretty deep,” Bruce Schneier, one of the country’s leading cyberexperts, wrote in The Atlantic, referring to the National Security Agency. “The agency might have intelligence on the planning process for the hack. It might, say, have phone calls discussing the project, weekly PowerPoint status reports, or even Kim Jong-un’s sign-off on the plan.”
“On the other hand, maybe not,” he wrote. “I could have written the same thing about Iraq’s weapons-of-mass-destruction program.”
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