What Is Cyberwar?

What Is Cyberwar? -- Jeffrey Carr, Slate

The defense community can't figure out how to define it.



What constitutes an act of cyberwar?



Before we get to that, there's a clue in the spelling of the word: cyberwar instead of cyber war. The U.S. Defense Department has determined that cyber is a fifth domain after air, land, sea, and space. We wouldn't call the World War II battle for domain of the skies an "airwar," or the showdowns over North African terrain "landwar." Yet somehow cyberwar has become the preferred term. The oddity of the convention reflects the fact that cyberwar is not quite "war," not quite "cyber," yet it is so palpably real that most developed and developing nations are standing up their own cyber commands to engage in it.



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My Comment: The phrase that perked me up was the following ....



.... The problem, of course, is that no one can agree on what constitutes an act of cyberwar.



Indeed. Read the entire piece.

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Stuxnet Virus Opens New Era of Cyber War

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Graphic: How Stuxnet sabotaged Iran's nuclear program. Der Spiegel

Mossad's Miracle Weapon: Stuxnet Virus Opens New Era of Cyber War -- Spiegel Online

The Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence agency, attacked the Iranian nuclear program with a highly sophisticated computer virus called Stuxnet. The first digital weapon of geopolitical importance, it could change the way wars are fought -- and it will not be the last attack of its kind.



The complex on a hill near an interchange on the highway from Tel Aviv to Haifa is known in Israel simply as "The Hill." The site, as big as several soccer fields, is sealed off from the outside world with high walls and barbed wire -- a modern fortress that symbolizes Israel's fight for survival in the Middle East. As the headquarters of Israel's foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, this fortress is strictly off-limits to politicians and journalists alike. Ordinarily, it is the Mossad that makes house calls, and not the other way around.



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My Comment: This post is a comprehensive analysis on the Stuxnet virus .... but it is written in a manner that is easy to follow and understand.

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U.S. Unprepared For Cyberwar

West Point students, from left, Lieut. Colonel Robert Fanelli and cadets Nathan Larsen, Mark Evinger (seated) and Marc Abbott participate in National Security Agency cyberwar games. Michael Falco / The New York Times / Redux

The Coming Cyberwar -- National Journal

Despite having had decades to absorb the implications of a range of advances in information technology, the U.S. government remains largely unprepared for cyberwar. A case in point is provided by the Pentagon, which has just released its security policy toward cyberspace. The strategy it sketches out is replete with “initiatives,” all of which are long on setting goals but curiously bereft of the means by which they might be attained. Even where there are some signs of the methods to be used, they seem for the most part quaint, rekindling as they do the concepts I remember being bruited about in the early 1990s.

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My Comment: A critical analysis on our cyber defenses (or lack of).

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