A New Face of War

StrategyPage, an web site devoted to what is going on militarily in the world, offers us a glimpse of what "cybergeddon" might be like. Their definition of cybergeddon is "a massive attack via the Internet that would cripple the economy, government and military."

In their January 22 article, Waiting For Cybergeddon, they describe three types of cyber war:

1. Limited stealth operations (LSO), as Chinese, Russian, and others, use Cyber War techniques to support espionage efforts.
2. Cyber War only (CWO), which is the open use of a full range of Cyber War weapons.
3. Cyber War in support of a conventional war.

To date, our experiences have been fairly limited. The one version of a CWO they cited was when Russia nearly shut down Estonia's national internet structure over the Estonian's removal of a Word War II statue. In this case, Estonia tried to invoke the NATO mutual-defense pact. NATA cyber war experts were actually dispatched to Estonia, but then the attacks stopped.

The sobering news is that the United States is said to be the most exposed to cyber war attack, because we use the internet more than any other country (what about South Korea?). According to the article, the so-called "good news" is that a major attack risks becoming the equivalent of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, which led to an enraged response.

Oh, brave new world!