Tag Archives: Cyber Security

Hack Attack:  Meeting this Cyber-Insecure Moment, Dr. Robert Zuber

30 Aug

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The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.  Jane Addams

In the underworld, reality itself has elastic properties and is capable of being stretched into different definitions of the truth.  Roderick Vincent

It must be, I thought, one of the race’s most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that “it can’t happen here” — that one’s own time and place is beyond cataclysm. John Wyndham

And you all know, security is mortals’ chiefest enemy.  William Shakespeare

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and few minutes of cyber-incident to ruin it.  Stephane Nappo

Hackers find more success with organizations where employees are under appreciated, over worked and under paid.  James Scott

Sometimes children do not realize by how fragile a thread their security hangs.   Mary Balogh

We are now well into six months of a pandemic that continues to evolve in both its biological and social impacts.   Scientists continue to learn more about transmission modalities, treatment options and the short and long-term health consequences of infection. Moreover, their investigations have revealed the mental health effects associated with our COVID-necessitated social isolation, from physically-distanced partners to children who stare at computer screens much of the day, pausing only to eat their lunch at an all-too-familiar kitchen table devoid of the happy noises of their friends and other classmates.

For many people I know the novelty of endless zoom meetings and other internet-tethered communications necessitated by this pandemic has long worn off.  We recognize the huge advantage that some of us in this world enjoy in the form of an ability to hold most of our own world together thanks to an abundance of digital access.  But there is fatigue and frustration as well, fatigue that some of the temporary accommodations we have made seem destined to become permanent; frustration that the inequalities and injustices now plaguing our societies seem destined to grow wider as our digital divides persist and our digital vulnerabilities grow.

Such vulnerabilities are related in part to the nature of our security-challenged digital playing field but more to our own “nature” as human beings, specifically our uncanny ability to “repurpose” resources that can enhance human possibility to ends which are self-interested at best and nefarious at worst.

Indeed, internet-based social media in our time has become something of a gold standard for such perversely repurposed resources.   The same platforms that allow us to stay connected to loved ones in the far-flung corners of the world; the same platforms that allow us to conduct “business” that we can’t now conduct over coffee or lunch; the same platforms that allow us to weigh in on political and social issues in ways we could not otherwise; such platforms have also become portals for the economic exploitation of disenfranchised persons and the virtual obliteration of personal privacy, as well as for the often-anonymous expression of every conceivable social grievance, conspiracy theory, bullying and character assassination, and incitement to hatred and violence.

I can’t speak for others, but there is no other place in my twittered life where I am exposed to nearly as much vile rhetoric, unchained egos and ideas which have more in common with propaganda than an honest (and dare we say humble) search for truth.  The fact that we have “made up our minds” about so many things frequently translates online into seductive sales pitches and threats against those whose minds are made up in a different direction.  We are all so smart, it seems, so full of righteous indignation, so willing to jump on any opinion that confirms our ill-conceived prejudices rather than explore ideas which might help us find a richer path.  And in a time which longs for those who can sift through the debris enabled by ideological bubbles filled with people willing to ask the first question but never the next one, what we have encouraged instead are people too comfortable with partisan security, anxious to use the internet to hurl critiques and condemnation but not to reflect and discern, not to strategize about ways to narrow the many chasms that we too have had a role in creating.

As most competent cyber security experts would surely confirm, there is digital danger in this moment for all of us, a moment when hacking and other online manipulations are directed at a wider range of personal and physical targets, and where we as a people seem often to be burying our collective heads in the sand while suppressing our will to “seek the good for all,” to address with conviction common and interconnected threats and not only the ones that challenge our tribe.

One of the positive developments at the UN in recent years has been its attention to such common security threats and related abuses associated with online portals.  In many parts of the UN system – from the General Assembly’s First Committee and Group of Governmental Experts to the Office of Counter-Terrorism (OCT) and the Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate (CTED), the UN has for some time been seized of the many security challenges associated with these portals, from disruptions to medical facilities and other civilian infrastructure to the luring of vulnerable young people into extremist movements and soliciting the resources needed to perpetuate their activities.

These concerns have recently found their way into Security Council deliberations with leadership from cyber-sophisticated Estonia and current Council president Indonesia. States are coming to realize that weapons and other physical manifestations of our violent inclinations are only one piece of the international security puzzle we are still not doing enough to solve.  After all, medical facilities can be disabled by hackers as well as by air strikes.  Power and water infrastructure can be rendered inoperative by cyber criminals as well as by missile launches.  Weapons can be neutralized (or even launched) through cyber manipulations as through direct military commands.

This week, officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the UN’s Institute for Disarmament Research briefed the Security Council on the “diverse and devastating destructive effects from cyber operations” on infrastructure and other public goods ranging from health care and other “vital services” to finance and (of particular concern in the US at the moment) elections.   And as the European Union warned, the “malicious intent” behind cyber-attacks does more than damage targets – it raises general levels of hostility and mistrust in what St. Vincent and the Grenadines reminded is our increasingly globalized world.  And given the times we are in and what the Netherlands rightly maintained is our “unprecedented dependence” on the internet, there is no reason for any of us to assume that a digital “cataclysm” will somehow, if by magic, bypass us.

We need to make sure that we are addressing the threat in full not in part.   To do so, we would do well to hold together what appear to be three pillars of cyber-concern.  The UN and its many partners know that we can bring more resources and expertise to bear in fighting malicious infrastructure hacking; but also to the task of mediating a social media environment which has fast become a swamp of narcissism, bigotry, conspiracy theory, extremist ideology, and “trollers” ruining reputations just for the fun of it.

But there is another piece to this puzzle, another responsibility raised by Russia and other states in the Council this week but communicated quite succinctly by Costa Rica – that while we are increasing cyber-space security we must also close a digital divide that robs so many of their potential:  robbing community farmers and medical practitioners of the information they need to grow more and heal better;  robbing children of the ability to maintain some vestige of educational progress and social connection without exposing themselves, their teachers and their families to a potentially deadly virus.

I was particularly moved this week by the image of two young children, sitting on the curb of a fast-food restaurant, trying desperately to secure enough band-width to log in to instruction that other classmates could easily access from home.  This is but one small instance of a digital divide that is expanding not shrinking and that (even as I write) is relegating perhaps millions of children to abandon the schooling their communities fought so hard to provide, the schooling these children will need in order to hold their own in this uncertain, unequal and threat-saturated world.

The social and security consequences of this persistent divide constitute a digital threat as grave as any other.  We have more than enough expertise at hand to both responsibly secure and fully enable access to digital spaces.  There is no time like the present to put that expertise to work.

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Apple Pay: Inspiring our Policy Perseverance, Dr. Robert Zuber

8 Dec

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.  Martin Luther

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.  Kurt Vonnegut

There are years that ask questions and years that answer. Zora Neale Hurston

The soul is healed by being with children. Fyodor Dostoevsky

Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. Madeleine L’Engle

At the end of another long week at the UN, diplomats and leadership struggled once again to cross the annual finish line. The Security Council held a session on Central Africa, including the conflict in Cameroon, which was more formula than foresight – conventional calls for dialogue and political will with only Belgium clearly grasping that efforts by the government to promote reconciliation in the primarily English speaking areas of the country have not impacted conditions on the ground; indeed seem to be intended more to placate an international audience than to quell the violence and open the door for accountability and justice.   Those few of us in the chamber who have followed the Cameroon conflict for some time and were hoping for a bit more defiance – or at least to witness the inspiration to defy – were largely disappointed.

Just down the hall, a two-day review of the Vienna Programme of Action for Landlocked Developing Countries (LLDCs) was also concluding.  This review, essential to the fulfillment of our sustainable development responsibilities, endorsed an excellent Political Declaration under the leadership of Austria and Bhutan which focused on the unique economic, security and trade-related challenges faced by states lacking sea access and, in some instances, even commercial interaction across land borders.

And yet this important event also ended with the whimper as both the President of the General Assembly and High Representative Utoikamanu struggled through prepared remarks in ways that sapped what little energy remained in the Trusteeship Council chamber.  Having lamented a day earlier the degree to which progress on sustainable development in many LLDCs remains stagnant, one would have hoped for a more determined set of final presentations, an infusion of energy which could communicate to delegations and a wider audience that there is sustainable passion behind the adopted Declaration, that we understand the full relevance of the plight of the LLDCs to the fulfillment of our 2030 Development Agenda promises.

Thankfully, there were other UN engagements this week with more abundant energy, including a Thailand-sponsored event on the importance of soil protection to sustainable agriculture, an excellent joint meeting of the Peacebuilding Commission and the Economic and Social Council on peace and security in the Lake Chad/Sahel region of Africa, and a multi-stakeholder Open-ended Working Group on developments in the field of information and telecommunications in the context of international security. The latter event brought dozens of academics and representatives of governments and civil society together to discuss cyber threats to elections, to weapons systems, and especially to what was often referred to as the “public core” of the internet that is now (as you surely know) awash in viruses, phishing scams, and other threats to privacy and protection.  What made this event work as well as it did was the willingness of the Chairs – Singapore and Switzerland – to privilege the expertise of the non-government representatives more than their government counterparts.  Most all Working Group participants seemed comfortable speaking with each other, rather than “over” each other as is so often the case here.

Despite these hopeful policy settings, the overall mood of the building seems now less of a roar and more of a whimper.  People are tired; in some instances, also clearly a bit discouraged.  Diplomats soldier on, read their statements, pay attention (more or less) to what others are sharing, and shuffle themselves between relevant conference rooms where all-too-familiar issues reappear on their agendas without resolution –and often without progress.  Funding is also unusually tight as key contributors (including Brazil and the US) withhold resources needed to keep the UN in full function, symbolized in part by a heavily-used escalator that now only runs to the 2nd floor instead of the 4th, as well as doors that are locked and meetings which are raced through more quickly than usual as there is currently no prospect of overtime pay for any UN employee.

From our vantage point, we are not as preoccupied with funding aspects per se as with their implications for inspiration, for visible energy and commitment, for expressions of enthusiasm that we actually have what it takes to meet our ambitious obligations to constituents; that we as a community remain undeterred by obstacles of logistics and budget which (if we are honest) appear largely irrelevant when placed alongside the impediments to persons ravaged by war and poverty, by drought and corrupt governance, by massive storms and equally massive indifference.

As we sit in diverse conference rooms each day trying to sew the pieces of relevant UN policy together and ensure in our own small way that efforts to obfuscate or even deceive are called out, what we look for – indeed long for – is inspiration: that sense of urgency to solve the problems that have wrecked havoc for far too long; that determination to use all of the abundant expertise available within the UN and to supplement it where needed with the best (and most diverse) of what is available outside; that regular acknowledgement that we can visualize who needs us and who we are working for; that we can feel at least some of the pain that comes from the impact of violence we have not averted, under-development we have not yet tackled, natural disasters we failed to predict, disease outbreaks we failed to prevent.

Diplomats have their own compensation mechanisms for functioning in what has become, too-often, a high-octane, low-inspiration environment.   For us on the non-government side, we are too often left to invent our own inspiration, to write our own sonnets and plant our own trees, to secure essential heart energy from places largely invisible to the eye.  In some conference rooms, such as was the case this week, positive energy is still accessible. In others, energy levels are far more lethargic than electric.

This is, indeed, a “first-world problem” but one with far broader implications.   What must it look like for global constituents to watch this community of policy muddle through issues that, for them, are literally matters of life and death?  How must it feel to read resolutions that purport to address constituent concerns with barely a shred of constituent intervention?  What must be the trust implications of promises made and then ignored, of binding declarations without schemes for implementation, of grave crimes that go perpetually unpunished or “cashed in” for the sake of “peace agreements?” For us here in the center of global governance, policy lethargy is an indulgence understandable at one level but almost unforgivable at another.

Back in the Security Council yesterday, it was indeed an inspiring site as we put away our computers and diplomats filed out of the chamber, to see a baby belonging to one of the UN diplomats crawling along our row, happy as he could possibly be, exploring a space that should have more to do than it does now with preserving and protecting his future and the many millions of girls and boys in his generational cohort.

We don’t see babies often enough in this seasonally-fatigued and too–often discouraged space packed with events and responsibilities but short on genuine enthusiasm and inspiration.  Lacking the presence of children, it seems too easy now to forget who we’re working for, the specific circumstances of who and what we’re perhaps only pretending to care about, the duties to promote and protect, to warn and respond, to assist and inspire, to question and discern, duties that come with our largely undeserved places at the center of policy. This peculiar iteration of policy amnesia is bad for constituents, but can’t be good for any of us here at the UN either, from senior officials to cafe servers.

I know that there is plenty of inspiration swirling around my own life, including some remarkable women, interns and other colleagues who are constantly exploring and finding new ways to place their skills and energies in the service of the world.   I need to tap into more of this energy going forward, in part so I can continue to plant the “apple trees” that are mine to plant,to invite others to create new sonnets, to better share my portion of inspiration directed primarily to the heart, and all this regardless of the current political circumstances or mood of the room.

I’m going to take a few days this week in an attempt to relocate that very tap.  I’ll let you know if I’m successful.

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