A collaborative South African defence-industry capability-building project is set to launch at the Africa Aerospace and Defence (AAD) exhibition in Centurion later this month. The initiative is called Project CLASSS, which stands for cyber, land, air, sea, space and security (particularly border security), and it looks to bring together capabilities from different South African defence and technology companies, rather than having different companies showcase isolated products. The goal of Project CLASSS is to provide sovereign security solutions in a more integrated, synergistic way, says Nithen Naidoo, founder and CEO at Snode Technologies. Snode is involved in the project's cyber component.
This project is important, he explains, because of how the threat landscape has evolved. Cyber can no longer be treated as a standalone IT problem. Cyber security has to be woven into land, air, maritime, space and border security capabilities. “What normally happens is people build systems, and then they call us in to vet the security afterwards. But today, cyber security cannot be an afterthought. Everything must be secure by design. By identifying what your security requirements are upfront, you know exactly what kind of house you need to build to properly protect yourself from the big bad wolf,” Naidoo says. And when the assets being attacked are public sector systems and critical infrastructure, the stakes are incredibly high, he adds.
We saw this in early September, when news broke that the largest water utility on the African continent had been hacked. The potential impact of an attack like this on a state-owned company serving millions of citizens is significant. In a similar, larger-scale incident, water providers across a dozen US states were targeted in a wave of co-ordinated cyber attacks in July. That attack compromised critical technologies at drinking and wastewater facilities.
These attacks signal the emergence of something we call “hybrid warfare”, which couple conventional fighting with non-traditional military tactics, like cyber attacks, misinformation and fake news. “Cyber attacks are increasingly being leveraged as a vector in modern hybrid warfare to compromise an opponent’s computer systems, power grids, water supply or financial markets. It’s clear that the world is in a state of conflict – some countries a little bit more overtly than others – and this is just another way that these conflicts are playing out.”
However, it is not only criminal actors that make collaboration important. A well-known example of how governments have used technology to conduct counter-intelligence operations is Operation Rubicon, which saw the CIA and West German intelligence agency, (BND), using a Swiss encryption company called Crypto AG, which they owned, to gather intelligence on foreign governments.
As nations become increasingly dependent on connected digital infrastructure, cyber can no longer be treated as simply an IT or corporate security issue. For sovereign states, it must be considered an essential part of national defence, concludes Naidoo. “This is why getting local companies to collaborate on a complete, sovereign capability through an initiative like Project CLASSS is crucial.”
AAD opens at Air Force Base (AFB) Waterkloof in Centurion on 16 September for three trade days, followed by an open day weekend.
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