Original subtitles

[atmospheric music plays]

[narrator] Codes and ciphers have been used to protect secrets

from ancient times to modern day.

Breaking these codes and ciphers

is crucial spycraft for successful espionage.

[man 1] And it gave us vital information

that we needed, for example, around the D-Day invasions.

[narrator] As codes are broken,

more complex systems are developed to protect them.

[man 1] They created 11 models of Colossus,

which was the world's first electronic computer.

[narrator] Nevertheless, advancements in technology come with risks.

[man 2] But to go into the ones and zeros

and discover a vulnerability you can exploit.

-That's the next level. -[narrator] Next level technology

seeks to override the safety measures of cryptography.

[man 3] Unlike physical attacks,

cyber-related attacks have a immediate impact.

They don't need to send bombs.

[suspenseful music playing]

How bad can it get?

I've used words catastrophic and existential.

[narrator] As the threat intensifies,

so does the job of the codebreaker.

They always describe the espionage as a chess match.

It's the same thing with electronics.

[theme music]

[narrator] Codes and ciphers have played an important role

in keeping information private throughout history.

What began with secret writings to hide information

has progressed to electro-mechanical ciphers

and then computers to send messages, and to decipher and break them.

Today, cyber espionage is used by intelligence agencies

and adversaries alike,

and has proved a useful strategy in the collection or corruption of data,

stealing technology and patents, disrupting critical infrastructures,

and allowing for advanced warning of an enemy's attack.

Every government in history has prized secrecy,

and has understood the importance of being able to communicate

among the leaders, and among their various embassies,

in a way that could not be read by their opponents.

[narrator] Codes and ciphers can be used to send messages

that can be communicated secretly,

but the two are often confused.

[Melton] So if you use a code word, Geronimo,

it may mean we successfully assassinated Osama Bin Laden.

One word means many things.

A cipher, in the contrast, is a particular type of code which usually means

that letters had been transposed or interchanged,

so that a message that had 550 characters

may still again have 550 characters,

but they've been arranged in a way

that they're unreadable without the key to the cipher.

Ciphers are a form of codes.

Thomas Jefferson,

one of the founding fathers of the United States,

and a great statesman,

realized the value of secret correspondence.

And in his papers,

were found the plans for a device we call the Jeffersonian cipher wheel.

You had a rod,

and you would assemble the disks in a certain order.

Once they were assembled,

you would adjust each disk when properly aligned,

here were now the characters of your message.

You would then arbitrarily pick a number, let's say ten.

You would then go to the 10th row of letters above that,

which'll just be gobbledygook,

and you would write down those letters,

and that is what you would send as your message.

Now the person with the corresponding piece

had to know the order in which the rotors would be assembled.

And once they did that, they would simply align the letters,

so you would read the gobbledygook,

and then they would back off ten characters,

and there would be the precise message.

In fact, it was so clever

that the U.S. government found this in his files,

and in 1920, began producing these for the U.S. Army,

and it was called the M94 Signal Device.

And it was actively used in the U.S. military

between 1920 and the beginning of World War II.

[narrator] Back in Jefferson's time,

ciphers and secret writings depended on algorithms

created by the human mind.

But between 1915 and 1924,

things changed with the advent of a device

called the Hebron Electric Rotor Machine.

For the very first time,

it was possible to produce a stream of ciphers

created by an electromechanical rotor system

that could not be solved by human minds alone.

And it was the first of a series of rotor systems

that would be used over the next 50 years

that would change how ciphers were created.

[narrator] In 1924, a man named Arthur Scherbius

took the same basic concept and created what would be

one of the most important cipher devices of the 20th century,

the German Enigma cipher machine.

And his idea was

that each machine

contained a series of rotors.

Each rotor had 26 settings

that could be changed,

and in the front of the machine

were a series of Stécker or cords

that was a plug board arrangement.

And the idea was,

it would take two people to operate the Enigma.

And the first person would take the clear text message

and he would press the letter A, for example,

if that's the first letter of the message.

And the message would then go from that A,

down to the plug board, and the plug board

would route it to a different number or a different letter.

That letter would in turn go to the first rotor,

into one of 26 permutations.

Then it would go into the second rotor, 26 permutations,

the third rotor, 26 permutations, hit a reflector,

come back times 26, times 26, times 26,

come into the plug board,

and then another light would be lit.

When it had completed its 26 rotations, which was called a jumbo,

then all of the rotors moved.

And the combination of the complexity of this device

was greater than human minds could decipher.

And the advantages of it

quickly were recognized by the German military.

It was adopted in the early 1930s

as the primary communication tool

of the Wehrmacht, the German military, the Luftwaffe.

[siren blaring]

[explosions in distance]

[narrator] The Enigma Machine played a crucial part

in the communication among the Nazi forces during World War II.

In the early 1930s,

Polish codebreakers had developed a machine called the Bomba

that had successfully deciphered some of the Enigma messages,

but the Germans kept modifying it to make it more complex.

The British and their allies were determined to break it,

and in 1939,

the British Government set up a code and cipher school

known as Station X at Bletchley Park just outside of London.

And it was built around the Bletchley Park Manor.

That and a large number of huts.

And the huts contained different groups

which were attacking individual

Enigma ciphers.

[narrator] Every message transmitted by the Nazis

went through British listening posts,

which were copied down in their code groups

and telegraphed to the secret army of codebreakers at Bletchley Park.

The British described any intelligence gained from Enigma as Ultra

and considered it top secret.

[Melton] And it gave us vital information that we needed, for example,

around the D-Day invasions.

And it helped us understand

the success of some of our deception operations

and helped us to tweak them to try to confuse the Germans.

[narrator] But the real game changer was Alan Turing,

a 24-year-old mathematical genius.

[Melton] Turing, during World War II, worked at Bletchley Park,

the government code and cipher school,

and spent his time attacking the German Enigma cipher.

[narrator] Turing came up with the idea behind Colossus,

a set of computers developed to help in cryptanalysis.

During World War II, they created 11 models of Colossus,

which was the world's first electronic computer.

It was one of the great accomplishments of the war.

Historians estimate that it shortened World War II

by between two and four years.

Turing, however, as brilliant as he was, had a very troubled personal life.

He was a homosexual at a time that homosexuality

was seen as a disability

and seen as a vulnerability for recruitment by foreign spies.

His security clearances were revoked in the early 1950s, and very sadly,

he committed suicide by biting into a poisoned apple,

and the world lost one of our great minds.

It's very interesting today and probably only a coincidence,

but if you look at the logo of Apple computer,

you'll see an apple with a bite out of it,

and though they disclaim any association with Alan Turing,

it certainly seems, at one level,

someone was paying homage to Turing

and his role in creating the world's first electronic computer.

[narrator] Enigma's settings offered 158 quintillion possible solutions,

yet the Allies were eventually able to crack its code.

Thanks to the advances made by Alan Turing and other codebreakers today,

mathematicians and scientists

are developing next level quantum computing.

[Bigman] In terms of espionage collection,

quantum computing just basically makes cryptography

potentially more difficult, because now people say,

"Well, you're using algorithms that are known to be breakable."

Yeah, they're known to be breakable,

but it's going to take you a long time to break them.

The information at that point's perishable.

Now we're talking a different game all together.

So if all the encryption algorithms we're using

can be broken by the opposition

at the same speed you're actually using it,

when you're decrypting it with the key

and they're decrypting it with quantum computing,

ugh, that gets a little difficult.

[narrator] Modern computers,

highly advanced versions of the ones used in Bletchley Park,

now dominate the world of cryptology.

In an age when billions of people, governments, and rogue states

are digitally connected,

today's scientists and hackers

have discovered that it is possible to use malware

to steal data off your digital device

that completely evades the protections built with cryptography.

Spyware is a software that can be planted

by adversarial parties on your system.

They have the ability to collect information.

They can collect your passwords.

They can record your conversations.

If you are making webinar calls or phone calls using your computer,

they can turn on your camera and record anything that you are doing.

All these are part of the spyware activities.

And that can be used against the person or against the government.

Foreign entities can use this information about people

who have clearances, for instance, can go and target those people.

[Gosler] It's not just a normal level of technical sophistication

that gives you this kind of capability,

but to go into the micro-electronics, and go into the ones and zeros

and discover a vulnerability within that system that you can exploit.

That's next level.

There are multiple definitions for cyber warfare,

but they generally all come down to the same thing.

It's using techniques

to attack another country

over an electronic or cyber means,

without resulting to physical warfare,

but you're still causing significant damage and harm to the target.

[narrator] Between 2000 and 2003,

a series of widespread cyberespionage attacks

code-named Titan Rain

were launched against the American defense infrastructure,

targeting high-level organizations like NASA, Sandia, and Lockheed Martin.

[Melton] The longest running attack

against the United States has been Titan Rain,

which targeted specifically at our intelligence services.

[narrator] The cyberattacks extradited vital information,

and left behind virtually undetectable beacons on compromised systems,

allowing them to reenter at will.

They averaged approximately 10-30 minutes per attack

and transmitted to drop zones located in South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan

prior to forwarding the data on to mainland China.

And it happens thousands and thousands of times a day, an hour,

repeated attacks against our systems.

And it's never let up.

[narrator] Investigators discovered the cyber breaches

were part of state sponsored cyber espionage attacks

conducted by the People's Republic of China.

Some of the information exfiltrated included aerospace documentation,

schematics from the Mars Orbiter,

and flight planning software used by the United States Air Force.

Another dramatic act of espionage was discovered in 2010

and involved a multi-nation cyberattack

against Iran's nuclear program.

It was called Stuxnet.

[suspenseful music playing]

[Melton] Stuxnet

exists because it was written

to attack the Siemens 7 operating system

that ran in a Windows environment in the plants in Iran

where they spun the centrifuges to enrich the uranium.

[Bigman] The Stuxnet attack, which allegedly was done by combinations

of Israel, the United States, western Europe,

as time goes by, the population gets larger and larger of who was involved,

attacked Iranian development nuclear production capabilities,

and brought down various systems

basically by being able to infect them with a virus.

[narrator] Since the Iranian computer systems didn't connect to the internet,

the Stuxnet virus had to be introduced into the operating system

through other more clandestine means.

I've heard remote maintenance access.

I've heard the laptop, they walked in, connected the laptop.

You know, every possible means will be postulated as an attack.

[narrator] A popular theory

is that the Stuxnet virus was introduced to the system

through infected thumb drives placed around the nuclear facility in Iran.

If you had a very high-grade thumb drive,

and you drop them selectively in parking lots

or you dropped them from the air, or you somehow introduced them,

someone's going to finally take and put that into the machine

to see who it belongs to.

And that's all it takes is one time to basically infect it.

[narrator] The exact method of how the thumb drives were introduced

has never been revealed,

but the plan worked

and Stuxnet penetrated Iran's operating system and attacked.

[Melton] What the system did was, it went to the Siemens controller,

and it sent a signal then to the operator

who's manning the speed of the centrifuges that says,

"This centrifuge is slowing down,"

which would mean the operator would want to turn up the speed

to increase it working.

But that was a fake signal.

And the more he turned it up, the more it appeared to slow down.

And so the operators kept turning up the speed of the centrifuges,

and in effect,

they tore themselves apart,

and literally it destroyed a significant component

of the Iranian system for enriching uranium.

It was a very, very effective attack,

and the world's probably a bit safer for a while longer because of it.

[narrator] It's not only big government installations

and organizations that are getting hit.

Cyberattacks happen wherever there are loopholes or open ports

that can be exploited,

like our own personal devices.

Today, every person carries with them a machine

that's more powerful than Enigma,

a cell phone.

[dialing tones, line calling]

So where you're at, you're usually carrying a cell phone with you.

So all your positioning information, where you've been, where you're going,

you know, 'cause you've got things in your calendar,

you've sent messages to people, um…

all that information, I'm not saying is being collected,

but all that information can be collected.

[Comeleguia] The modern smartphone as we know today,

has evolved over the decade.

The processing power embedded in these systems are immense.

They have the ability to do cryptography on the fly

as a part of the hardware.

This adds significant benefits for individuals but, for adversaries,

it allows them to capture a great deal of private information about you.

[narrator] Not only are adversaries able to exploit information stolen from you,

they can also benefit from some of the same applications.

[tense music playing]

In late November 2008,

the Lashkar-e-Taiba,

the Pakistani terrorist group,

launched a sophisticated coordinated attack

against the city of Mumbai.

It was so effective

that it's the first attack that used cell phones

as weapons of mass disruption.

[narrator] Ten individuals armed only with cell phones, small arms,

and hand grenades were able to paralyze Mumbai,

one of the largest cities in India, and capture the attention of the world.

And it showed how useful cell phones can be

to disrupt communications, to plan an attack.

The Lashkar-e-Taiba layered 16 levels

of commercial off-the-shelf technology,

and enabled the terrorist to communicate secretly,

and to be controlled in real time by their handlers back in Pakistan.

In the same way that our U.S. military has the advanced technology

that we can have cameras on a helmet, or can have an earphone,

and you can talk to your command structure back thousands of miles away

using only commercial technology,

the terrorists were able to do the same thing

from their control points in Pakistan.

By swapping SIM cards, by swapping phones, by taking phones from victims,

they were able to completely confuse, confound,

and befuddle the Mumbai authorities.

They had no idea how many people were attacking them.

Estimates were, it was between one and 200 people.

In reality, it was ten lone individuals.

[narrator] Seven years after the Mumbai attacks,

terrorist attacks on the cafés, soccer stadium,

and Bataclan theater in Paris showed striking similarities.

[sirens blaring]

[Melton] It was all coordinated by a cell

that was in Paris and in Brussels.

And they had known each other for years.

There was no advanced chatter detected on the internet,

and they kept their communications point-to-point encryptioned,

using systems

that were encrypted the entire way,

so there was no way to get any advanced warning of it.

And it has to be the harbinger of future terrorist attacks.

And it's frightening

when we don't have the pre-attack chatter to help us be prepared.

[narrator] As our society becomes more and more dependent on technology,

we also become more vulnerable to potential attacks.

[Comeleguia] As the cities evolve, they become smarter.

Today, your phone has the ability to emit you are a pedestrian

in a smart city environment.

So when cars come too close to the pedestrians,

the smart cars have the ability to break and avoid the accident.

But at the same time,

that information can reveal your identity.

Adversaries can utilize that information

and turn car into assassination device to attack a person.

Instead of stopping, they can accelerate the car.

[narrator] With billions of people online and every government sending out signals,

the sheer scale of the codebreakers' job is mind boggling.

As a result, ciphers have become increasingly complex.

[Bigman] Chess… They always describe the espionage as a chess match, right?

You move, we countermove, you move, we countermove.

Same thing with electronics.

[narrator] A hostile organization having access to detailed information

about a person or government is frightening.

But even more daunting are cyber assaults that have the potential

to shut down a country's infrastructure.

[Melton] The closest we've ever seen to a country being shut down

was the Russian attack on Estonia.

[Joyal] You have also the hacking community in Russia who are told,

"You can steal as much as you want,

but when the knock comes on the door in the middle of the night,

we ask you to do something, you're gonna do it for us."

[narrator] By all accounts,

the knock on the door came for The Republic of Estonia,

a tech-savvy nation of 1.3 million, in April of 2007.

The Russians virtually attacked the infrastructure of Estonia.

They shut down the newspapers, the broadcasts.

They shut down Parliament. They shut down the ministries.

ATMs stopped working. The internet didn't work.

Their society was dependent on it.

[Joyal] They basically shut down the e-conomy, electronic-based economy,

for a period of time.

They did not utilize their military or intelligence assets.

They used the criminal underground

as a… in this covert action that was obviously sanctioned by the government.

[narrator] Cyberattacks on Estonia

targeted websites of Estonian organizations,

including the Parliament, banks, ministries, newspapers, and broadcasters.

They used ping floods and botnets usually used for spam distribution.

Estonia had just rebuilt, coming out of communism,

so everything was relatively new.

They had new infrastructure, but they were dependent on the internet.

Everything was on the internet.

Suddenly that goes down, and they're quickly thrown back decades almost into a,

not the stone age, nothing worked.

You couldn't draw money out. You couldn't get gasoline.

You couldn't get food.

Cities were very vulnerable. They taught that.

The Russians have a very effective cyber warfare capability.

[narrator] Estonia was one victim of cyber warfare by the Russians.

Then in 2016 Crimea,

a disputed territory under the control of the Russian federation became another.

Then you see the culmination of all of this with the Crimea invasion

in which we see the so-called hybrid warfare,

little green men, electronic attacks.

Some of the first targets of the Spetsnaz,

special forces of the Russians working undercover in Crimea

with a… telephone switching stations because they took over those

and they started sending malware into the broader cell phone networks

of Ukraine,

shutting down the ability of legislatures

to use their cell phones, or government officials.

[narrator] Many believe Russia's attack on Crimea

is only the beginning of what's to come.

[Joyal] Today, the war that's going on in the Ukraine,

this is the testing ground for electronic warfare,

for information warfare, for hacking.

They've used malware to shut down the electrical systems.

This is a laboratory

that they are using to perfect their science of new,

integrated, or hybrid warfare.

[Melton] Cyber warfare is a form of asymmetrical warfare,

in that it enables a smaller actor with smart people

to use a bunch of computers and an internet service,

and essentially attack a much larger opponent very effectively.

So at times, depending on the size of your country,

it can be a very good response.

North Korea, Pakistan, China,

they have effective, very effective cyber warfare capabilities.

So, many countries see it as very useful.

Of course, the allies, the U.S., Great Britain, Canada, Australia,

we have very effective cyber warfare capabilities ourselves.

[Comeleguia] Unlike physical attacks, cyber-related attacks,

because of the interconnected world,

can have immediate impact on the performance of a city.

So with attacks in critical infrastructure,

cities can be disabled in a matter of minutes.

They don't need to send bombs.

[narrator] A city's critical infrastructure might include

its power grid, water supply, communications, transportation systems,

food supplies, financial services, and nuclear power plants.

A cyberattack on one or more of these systems could render a city helpless,

while a sustained attack could have devastating consequences.

[Melton] If you stop ATM machines working,

you stop gas going into a city

and deliveries of food in every major city,

within seven days it's expected you'll have full all-on riots.

So the ability to launch a coordinated attack against our infrastructure

could potentially be far worse than Pearl Harbor.

[Gosler] One of the questions that I'm frequently asked is how bad can it get,

and I've mentioned, I've used the words catastrophic and existential

relative to the loss of everything

electrical, computer, power, et cetera.

[alarms blaring]

There's no comms, there's no-- cars are not working,

there's no power to the houses,

that means refrigeration doesn't work, your cooking utensils don't work,

nothing works, and no one knows why.

Most everyone can survive a day or a few days

based upon the supplies they have at home.

When you start getting to a week it starts getting harder,

especially, you know, there's no running water, right?

Very low likelihood that this would happen,

but low likelihood catastrophic impact that's worth thinking about,

so I would recommend that everyone do that.

[Bigman] Anytime now something happens in the world,

you know, an airplane loses power in mid-air,

or something happens to a communications network,

God forbid a local ISP goes down for five seconds,

somebody will be writing, "Oh, this is a potential--

possibly a hack from Iran."

Well, I don't think so.

You know, these networks are, believe me, are--

they have some degree of reliability,

but they're sensitive to perturbations of their infrastructure, so…

and lots of moving pieces and things do go wrong.

[Joyal] First of all, the future is here. The future is here.

This is going on, and this is a challenge the U.S. has.

We got out of the business years ago

in electronic warfare,

because we did not believe at the end of the Cold War,

that we would face Russia as a…

in a conventional military setting in Europe.

Now, that has all changed. We have to be concerned about that.

[Gosler] You basically have to deter it.

You can't defend against it, so if you're a target,

if you would be a target of interest of Russia today, or China today, they win.

You lose.

It's best not to be their target.

[Melton] Codes and ciphers are essential for businesses to survive and exist,

for money to be transferred, for our economy to work.

What we're struggling with is,

how do we see that it's available for good use,

but don't have it available so that the bad guys

can exploit it and do bad things?

And we haven't solved that question yet.

[atmospheric music playing]