or nothing

SIMON CARABETTA

IN CYBERSECURITY, IT’S BELLUM ROMANUM, OR NOTHING

by Simon Carabetta, Business Operations Lead at ES2

Picture this. It is the second century BCE. You have been conscripted via a lottery to fight in a land war for the Republic of Rome. Instead of being issued with standard weaponry and equipment, you must provide your own. You will have to undergo extensive training along with a number of other inexperienced young men to fight an army from a place you have likely never heard of nor would ever travel to. If you are lucky, you survive and return home victorious, only to be told to return to your daily life after receiving your (quite insubstantial) pay.

This was the way the early Republic raised an army each time a battle or war needed to be fought. There was little professionalism, and the concept of a standing army was unknown. It emerged only when a general by the name of Gaius Marius made a number of sweeping changes to the practices and procedures of the army, known as the Marian Reforms.

While some historians (don’t worry, this isn’t a history paper, I will get to my point) dispute that Gaius Marius deserves all the credit for these reforms, because they simply formalised practices already in place, the reforms transformed the army from a force comprised of casual conscripts into one of professional soldiers.

I do not really need to tell you the rest of the story. We all know how powerful the Roman military became and how it was partially responsible for the Roman Republic becoming the Roman Empire. However, you do need to take two key concepts from this article:

1. The Marian reforms formalised professional standards 2. Bellum Romanum

What is Bellum Romanum? Translated from the Latin, it simply means, Roman War. Why am I giving a history lesson on the way the Romans conducted warfare? The answer is relevant to Australia in the context of cyber warfare and our own security industry. We need to wage Bellum Romanum.

In a way, we have already begun to do so. The Australian Federal Police was recently reported to have teamed up with the Australian Signals Directorate to create our first offensive cyber unit. We now have foot soldiers provided with the best equipment, tools and weaponry by the Commonwealth Government and charged to take down the bad guys.

That statement is much more sobering when you recognise who the bad guys are. We know how the completely unjustified invasion of Ukraine by Russia was the trigger for a massive increase in cyber criminal activity. However, it was when Ukraine’s minister for digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov (the country’s youngest ever minister) called on the international cybersecurity and hactivist community to attack Russian networks and infrastructure that I started thinking about national cyber warfare readiness. I started to realise how switched on Fedorov is, but also how destructive his call might eventually be. Cyber criminals have no honour, so a message that it is suddenly open season on an entire nation is definitely not one anyone should be sending. It creates a very dangerous precedent.

Back to Bellum Romanum. How does this fit with Australia’s current position? Are we cyber warfare ready? Have we begun making our own version of the Marian Reforms to train and equip the best of the best in our federal cybersecurity command?

I think one of the best recent examples of such a reform of our cyber defences is the ADF Cyber Gap program. This has certainly been a monumental move in the right direction, and has been very timely given the rising tensions in our region, the rise of information warfare and disinformation campaigns, and the increasingly well-armed and well-equipped advanced persistent threat actors across the world.

Australia has begun to develop a ‘standing army’ of cybersecurity foot soldiers. We still have much work to do and not much time to do it. However, I feel fairly confident our cybersecurity defence is in the right hands. We shall see how things play out over the next 12 months. More reforms? Increases in budgets? Recruitment campaigns? We must realise, as a nation, how important our cyber defences are. It is now a matter of all or nothing. Bellum Romanum, or cyber devastation.

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