Why Microsoft's Craig Mundie Worries About Weapons Of Mass Disruption

We live in a world were computers are quickly becoming ubiquitous.Chances are that you have one in your pocket right now. There are also a few controlling your car, the traffic lights on the streets, and plenty other ones you might not be aware about. The professional world has not been immune to this phenomenon. Computer have been able to shrink our world in to what Marshall McLuhan referred as a global village (Understanding Media 1964). We are at a point were it is just as easy to move information locally as it is globally, thus transforming the business environment and making business happen faster than ever before. As computers become more common place in our life, people like Craig Mundie (Senior advisor to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer), are becoming concerned about what happens when people with access to technology want to cause harm. Craig tells us that there are basically five types of malevolent things people can do in the cyber world. These are: malicious mischief, crime, espionage, warfare, and terrorism. And they can be perpetrated by: amateurs, pros, and governments. Mundie spends a lot of time talking to world leaders about current issues regarding internet security and where this field is headed in the future. Mundie is most alarmed about what he calls “weapons of mass disruption” he states that “on the Internet, things can happen so fast, at such a high scale, I believe no country has prepared itself to deal with a disruption that happens to the entire country at the same time.” An example he gives, is that of a cyber attack on the U.S power grid. Mundie argues “how does the country bootstrap itself back into operation when there’s no part of the country that’s running? These are scary thoughts", he claims. And these are indeed very scary thoughts, and it is about time we start thinking about them and how to prevent them. Mundie divided this threats into five categories and three kinds of perpetrators, giving us about 15 kinds of threats to guard against. These distinctions have to be made, as Mundie states that “When everyone puts everything under the banner of cybersecurity it becomes something that’s not actionable, and that’s the problem we have had with policy-makers—they can’t separate economic espionage from cyber-terrorism from warfare, and they’re all very different,” Mundie says. “Each of them is going to be different, in my view, in terms of what we’re going to have to do about it.” The problem now a days is that computers are increasing an individual's power to do harm exponentially, and malicious cyber attacks are getting to be more common place. Mundie points out that in Agust of 2012 Aramco (aSaudi Arabian oil company )lost about 30,000 computers to an attack thought to be perpetrated by the Iranian government. “This is a nation-state attacking a private business for the purposes of getting the attention of the other nation's state leaders,” He says. “Governments have capabilities they are willing to use that are just not available even to criminal organizations. For that company, it was a very long slog.”

But, this attacks have not been limited to governments and private companies. Government to government attacks have become more common place. in 2013 North Korea launched a destructive cyber attack against South Korea. Mundie calls this a “a very scary evolution, because you’re starting to see people willing to deploy these things against what could become critical infrastructure.” Mundie has concluded that the start of the cyber arms race can be traced to the year 2011, when the U.S declared that the cyberspace is the fifth domain of warfare, along with land, water, sky, and space. What makes this fifth domain so remarkable, is that it intertwines with all other four. Mundie says, “In a kinetic war, you wouldn’t say, ‘I’ll only use the navy.’ Well, now people are saying no, I won’t only use the kinetic or I won’t only live in cyber. You blend them together.” This means that if a enemy uses cyber techniques to cause harm, it does not mean that the retaliators will use the same means. A cyber attack can be retaliated against with artillery rather than with zeros and ones. Mundie states, “If I do some bad things to you in cyber space, you will come back and do some bad things to me in cyberspace. People are now beginning to realize that there is no clean dividing line between these two.” Even though all of this threats are emerging, technology is here to stay, just like electricity and running water. Since everything is eventually going to depend on the cyberspace, everyone will have a reason to oppose cyber crime, thus creating a common cause against cyber crime and cyber terrorism. "If terrorists are able to disrupt the global banking system, no country is immune.” Mundie argued. So, we are all in this together. While Mundie is not your classical leader, he has been leading the way in this developing scenario as an advisor to the world's leaders, as well as advocating change in the hardware we currently use and the policies that govern them. He is being proactive, and trying to make global leaders understand that “when you have those kinds of actors … we need to find a way to have those countries and their capabilities cooperate in both deterring and addressing or even fighting back.”

Works Cited.
Burke, A. (2013). Why microsoft's craig mundie worries about weapons of mass disruption. Forbes, Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/techonomy/2013/11/15/why-microsofts-craig-mundie-worries-about-weapons-of-mass-disruption/