Four thousand soldiers to defend cyberspace

In our digit­al era, nation­al defence and the mil­it­ary also oper­ate in cyber­space to fight off the increas­ing num­bers of attacks in this new battlefield.

The digit­al trans­form­a­tion of all activ­it­ies goes hand in hand with an increase in attack sur­face with new vul­ner­ab­il­it­ies for cit­izens, com­pan­ies and insti­tu­tions, but also for the defence and mil­it­ary sec­tors. In the same way that crim­in­als have inves­ted in cyber­space, extrem­ist groups, ter­ror­ist organ­isa­tions or back rooms act­ing on the behalf of for­eign states, take advant­age of this vir­tu­al space without bor­ders in which they can act rap­idly and per­man­ently cov­er their tracks.

In Octo­ber 2019, Florence Parly, the French Min­is­ter for the Armed Forces, declared that France had already been tar­geted over 800 times by cyber­at­tacks in only 9 months*. The object­ives of these attacks were the same than those before the digit­al age: espi­on­age, destabil­isa­tion, sab­ot­age, manip­u­la­tion, etc. The attack­ers, who adap­ted to the avail­able tech­no­lo­gic­al means, are groups of hack­ers seek­ing data to sell, back doors onto the payroll or at the ser­vice of for­eign states.

This con­text led the Min­istry of the Armed Forces to build an oper­a­tion­al com­mand ded­ic­ated to cyber defence: “Com­Cy­ber”. Cyber­space is now a new field of oper­a­tion and even though cyber defence does not have an army per se, it acts in the same capa­city as the Ground, Nav­al, Air and Space armed forces.

Cre­ated in May 2017, Com­Cy­ber is in charge of mil­it­ary cyber defence. The 2019–2025 mil­it­ary pro­gram­ming law alloc­ated a budget of 1.6 bil­lion euros and the recruit­ment of 1100 cyber-sol­diers to the com­mand. When asked to explain his role, the Gen­er­al Didi­er Tis­seyre, replied without hes­it­a­tion, “I am paid to be para­noid. Our mis­sion is to fend off any mil­it­ary attack against our nation State”.

The tone is set. “Today in cyber­space, we are not in a time of war or peace, but in a state of per­man­ent crisis!”, he adds. The mis­sions of Com­Cy­ber cov­er two main areas in the fight against cyber­crime: defence (LID, Lutte inform­atique Défens­ive) and offence (LIO, Lutte inform­atique Offens­ive). Fight­ing against jihadists, for example, now requires ground and air forces, as well as sol­diers in cyberspace.

The pur­pose of Com­Cy­ber is not only to defend the inform­a­tion sys­tems of all the entit­ies of the Min­istry of the Armed Forces against attacks, but also to defend embed­ded com­puter sys­tems used in oper­a­tions. These are found in weapons, indus­tri­al machinery, energy sup­ply equip­ment, etc. This equip­ment is as much if not more likely to be attacked through digit­al media, as shown by the exper­i­ence of the U.S. Depart­ment of Defense. For sev­er­al years, it has organ­ised open chal­lenges dur­ing which “white hats”, or “eth­ic­al” hack­ers, are invited to test the resi­li­ence of secur­ity sys­tems and seek vul­ner­ab­il­it­ies. In 2019, it only took 48 hours for clev­er hack­ers to take con­trol of a F‑15 Eagle fight­er air­craft. These things do not hap­pen only in movies!

The French Min­istry of Armed Forces also per­forms these secur­ity flaw hunts called “bug bounty” pro­grams. With one dif­fer­ence: eth­ic­al hack­ers are recruited among the cyber-defence reserv­ists and the civil­ian and mil­it­ary per­son­nel of the Min­istry of Armed Forces.

New chal­lenges call for new types of organ­isa­tion and meth­ods. The min­istry now includes 3000 cyber-sol­diers (4000 are planned for 2025) and one-third of these is dir­ectly attached to Com­Cy­ber. The oth­er two-thirds are divided in dif­fer­ent ser­vices of the Min­istry of the Armed Forces, or pos­ted in spe­cial­ised ser­vices such as the Nation­al Agency for the Secur­ity of Inform­a­tion Sys­tems (ANSSI, Agence nationale de la sécur­ité des sys­tèmes d’in­form­a­tion).

And, con­trary to what one may think, they are not all cod­ing experts. “It is true that we need digit­al spe­cial­ists, but we also need experts in geo­pol­it­ics, social engin­eer­ing, social net­works, mil­it­ary oper­a­tions, etc.”, indic­ates Didi­er Tisseyre.

*Since this inter­view, in a recent study Neustar estim­ate that the num­ber of cyber­at­tacks dur­ing the first 6 months of 2020 was 151% high­er than the fig­ures for the same peri­od of the pre­vi­ous year. They con­clude there­fore that the Cov­id crisis has had an impact on cybersecurity.