![]() Why the who, what and how of cyberwarfare matters is because how these factors combine will help determine what kind of response a country can make to a cyberattack. And using hackers to spy or even to steal data would not in itself be considered an act of cyberwarfare, and would instead come under the heading cyber espionage, something which is done by nearly all governments.įor sure there are many grey areas here (cyberwarfare is basically one big grey area anyway), but calling every hack an act of cyberwar is at best unhelpful and at its worst is scaremongering that could lead to dangerous escalation. The weapons used are important, too - cyberwar refers to digital attacks on computer systems: firing a missile at a data center would not be considered cyberwarfare, even if the data center contained government records. The nature and scale of the targets attacked is another indicator: defacing an individual company's website is unlikely to be considered an act of cyberwarfare, but disabling the missile defence system at an airbase would certainly come at least close. But state-backed hackers doing the same thing to destabilise a rival state's economy might well be considered so. One example: cyber crooks who crash a bank's computer systems while trying to steal money would not be considered to be perpetrating an act of cyberwarfare, even if they come from a rival nation. Nation states' conflict is increasingly moving online. Still, in the murky world of cyberwarfare there are plenty of blurred lines: states providing support to hackers in order to create plausible deniability for their own actions is, however, a dangerously common trend. ![]() If cyberwar is best understood as serious conflict between nations, that excludes a lot of the attacks that are regularly and incorrectly described as cyberwarfare.Īttacks by individual hackers, or even groups of hackers, would not usually be considered to be cyberwarfare, unless they are being aided and directed by a state. ![]() Governments and nation states are now officially training for cyberwarfare: An inside look.Inside the secret digital arms race: Facing the threat of a global cyberwar.To qualify the attacks really should be of significant scale and severity. Like other forms of warfare, cyberwarfare in its purest sense is usually defined as a conflict between states, not individuals. These include the identity of the attacker, what they are doing, how they do it - and how much damage they inflict. Whether an attack should be considered as an act of cyberwarfare depends on a number of factors. What is - and what is not - cyberwarfare? Cybercrime and cyberwar: A spotter's guide to the groups that are out to get you.The impossible task of counting up the world's cyber armies.NSA chief: This is what a worst-case cyberattack scenario looks like.
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