From...

December 30, 1999
Web posted at: 1:13 p.m. EST (1813 GMT)

by Douglas F. Gray

BERLIN (IDG) -- In a sign of how wars will be fought in the future, this year's conflict in Serbia relied on using technology to a new extent. In addition to being fought with weapons, it was fought with information.

In the future, it will be this type of "information warfare" that will make it difficult to figure out if countries are even at war with each other, according to Frank Rieger, who follows the topic for hacker group Chaos Computer Club.

Rieger, speaking at the 16th annual Chaos Communication Congress here in Berlin, said that information is such an important aspect of war that "if the Americans feel that destroying civilian infrastructure is necessary, they will do it, by all means."

Rieger doesn't feel that the U.S. is the only country with this mindset, but because they are the only remaining superpower, they are the most visible.

"The main method of attack by NATO during the (Kosovo) war was to destroy communications infrastructure in Serbia," Rieger said. "They tried to hit the tanks first, but the Serbs had too many decoys, so NATO would blow up the decoys... it came down to the fact that the Serbs would protect their military infrastructure by simply not using it."

The Serbs also used their own methods of information warfare. "They monitored GSM (global systems for mobile communications) traffic from German and NATO troops who were calling their families at home. The Serbs would then call the families of the NATO troops in the guise of a NATO officer, and tell the families that the soldier was killed in battle," according to Rieger.

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He was not so quick, however, at pointing to the mistaken bombing of the Chinese embassy as information warfare. "It could be that (NATO) was fed false information by the Serbs, but it's more likely that the Americans were the victims of their own military snafu," Rieger said.

The value of communications interception in warfare has already been seen, and in the future countries will find new methods of waging information warfare, Rieger said. "Most of the wars are fought, if not won, by signals intelligence. Countries now simply fight by disrupting the communication of the enemy," he added.

"The border between war and peace is becoming more diffused. Soon, you will not even be able to tell if countries like India and Pakistan are at war, or at peace," Rieger said.

For instance, a government could destabilize the economies and governments of neighboring countries by spreading false information. Rieger compared this to a high-tech form of dropping leaflets. "However, leaflets are distinguishable as leaflets, the key is feeding false information to a source that can be trusted (by the target country)," he added.

One confusing aspect of information warfare is that a communications systems glitch is not necessarily an attack by a hostile country. For example, in conventional warfare a dropped bomb is obviously an attack, but in information warfare, it's difficult to tell if a communications problem is a deliberate attack, hacking, or simply a system malfunction.

"One of the things we (at the Choas Computer Club) are doing now is raising the consciousness of the hackers not to cause any diplomatic problems," Rieger said. "We are telling them to select other targets to explore," he added. "Altering the home page of the Israeli embassy is not a good idea."