Blog Post 3: Cyberwarfare

It’s common knowledge that information is power. Those who have understood this count amongst history’s greatest leaders, but in the digital age, information is abundant and access to it is both limitless and instantaneous. The threat of information being stolen or manipulated has spawned a new type of conflict: cyberwar. Cyberwar is a battle to both control information and to manipulate the vast network of computers that makes our modern world run. In many ways, cyberwar is more serious and effective than open combat because now, with our increased reliance on computer systems, the possibility to bring down an entire country without firing a shot is a very real possibility.

The possibilities of cyberwarfare were seen in the private sector as early as the 1980’s, when civilian hackers would infiltrate supposedly secure systems to pilfer information. The phenomenon was popularized by the entertainment industry, but recently the instances of countries becoming involved in organized espionage and network disruption has increased. In 2009, the US admitted that the nation’s power grid could be compromised by cyber terrorists looking to disrupt the country’s infrastructure. It was thought then that Russian or Chinese spies could infiltrate the system to disrupt a country without causing an international incident. China, in fact, is one of several countries who have made intensive efforts to develop a cyber army for that express purpose and has been addressed as a possible threat by a 2010 Annual Department of Defense report.

The threats to security are grave indeed: logic bombs that can disrupt mechanical operations, the theft or tampering of secure information, and the disruption of satellites or even the internet network itself ranks among some of the most dire concerns. What sounds like science fiction has been happening since the 1980’s, and in the 2000’s has been rapidly gaining momentum. Major world powers have not turned a blind eye to this trend, and nearly every developed nation now has a department devoted to protecting their respective systems from attacks. The United States is only slightly different in that its division mainly protects government and military assets, leaving the commercial systems to develop their own measures of security. The United States has also struggled with introducing a fail-safe “kill switch” for the Internet that would essentially give the President emergency control over the United State’s telecommunications network. The difficulty in this proposal is the obvious issues of having a privatized system given over to government control.

Ultimately, this will be a field of combat that will continue to grow as our reliance on computer networks increases. Instead of a cold war arms race, we now face an intellectual arms race in which computer experts must be trained in the ins and outs of cyber warfare. At the moment, countries like Iran, China and Russia have some of the largest forces when it comes to cyberwarfare. Israel has learned from conflicts with Russian hackers that have been hired in various conflicts to disrupt Israel’s systems about how to combat these threats. Also, Europe has recently initiated a cross-European cyber war simulation in order to formulate a better strategy to combat a possible electronic assault. The number of conflicts from 2000 up has continued to escalate, and concern has risen amongst superpowers, proving that this new arena will be a much bigger component in both terrorism and international conflict.