General Hayden used a humorous analogy to describe the creation of the online world. “Cyberspace has been built as flat as a Northern German plain, and now everyone is moaning that we’re getting invaded”.
The ‘flatness’ of cyberspace is giving an advantage to the offense, argued General Hayden. “We need to build the equivalent of rivers and hills into the web – create geography with boundaries that will help us to defend”.
General Hayden considers cyberspace the fifth domain, joining land, sea, air and space. “It’s liberating to think of it as a domain, it’s a comfortable model, but it has cracks. Unlike the other four domains, cyberspace is manmade and we haven’t done a very good job”.
He expressed belief that the term cyber warfare is used too loosely. “It’s thrown at anything nasty that happens online. We’re too sloppy with the language. But you have to be aware that you can’t do anything in cyberspace without something ‘going pop’ in one of the other four domains. Cyberspace isn’t just a video game and we’re still trying to figure out the rules”.
While General Hayden admitted that his keynote speech raised more questions than he answered, he was certain that cyber-espionage is happening on a large scale and argued that the answer to the problem is to “Just defend. In a recent survey, USA was named the most feared nation in cyberspace. We’re good at this, but we have to keep defending”.
In conclusion, General Hayden declared that at the moment, the advantage in cyberspace is with the attackers, “which is unacceptable. We need to re-position ourselves, and we need to get things right long term. There has been a recent weakening of the American resolve – we need to consider international discussion to get this right”.