Assorted "cyber attacks" have attracted much attention in the past few months. One headline in this genre recently proclaimed "Anonymous Declares War on Orlando." This is wrong on so many levels that it almost defies analysis.
This is a frequent critique of the term cyberwar, but I think it is using the wrong paradigm of war or at least a far too narrow definition of it. We are comfortable calling the period of time after the end of WWII to the fall of the USSR as the Cold WAR. I don’t see anyone saying this is an inaccurate description of what took place. There were times when the Cold War turned hot, but the vast majority of the Cold War was about espionage, intelligence and an arms race. To me the current Cyberwar looks a lot like the early days of the Cold War. I understand that there is a resistance to the hype surrounding the term. I think many, in recoiling against this hype, are pigeonholing cyberwar into a corner more appropriate for a definition of kinetic warfare. I see cyberwar fitting in with several definitions of warfare and honestly I think one of the issues we are running into is many Information Security professionals do NOT have the Foreign Policy/Military History background to understand that War is a very broad and general term that has been and continues to be debated! Nation states may not have declared a Cyberwar and they may not be waging a cyberwar, but we are in the middle of a cyberwar that will shape national policy in ways we cannot yet imagine.
The problem with the term "cyberwar" is that "war" is used in so many ways to describe all types of conflicts that the term suffers from hyperbole. To add insult to injury, our governments use political language to obfuscate what is actually with terms like "conflict" and "direct action".
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This is a frequent critique of the term cyberwar, but I think it is using the wrong paradigm of war or at least a far too narrow definition of it. We are comfortable calling the period of time after the end of WWII to the fall of the USSR as the Cold WAR. I don’t see anyone saying this is an inaccurate description of what took place. There were times when the Cold War turned hot, but the vast majority of the Cold War was about espionage, intelligence and an arms race. To me the current Cyberwar looks a lot like the early days of the Cold War. I understand that there is a resistance to the hype surrounding the term. I think many, in recoiling against this hype, are pigeonholing cyberwar into a corner more appropriate for a definition of kinetic warfare. I see cyberwar fitting in with several definitions of warfare and honestly I think one of the issues we are running into is many Information Security professionals do NOT have the Foreign Policy/Military History background to understand that War is a very broad and general term that has been and continues to be debated! Nation states may not have declared a Cyberwar and they may not be waging a cyberwar, but we are in the middle of a cyberwar that will shape national policy in ways we cannot yet imagine.
The problem with the term "cyberwar" is that "war" is used in so many ways to describe all types of conflicts that the term suffers from hyperbole. To add insult to injury, our governments use political language to obfuscate what is actually with terms like "conflict" and "direct action".
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