Cyberwar. It sounds like a term from a future in which soldiers no longer face each other, but get robots thousands of kilometres away to do the dirty work. Not so – cyber attacks have been taking place for years. The first one on record was in 1982 when the Americans blew up a Soviet gas pipeline by tampering with software.

The whole world is now linked by internet and that makes cyber attacks much simpler. Retired major-general Kees Homan, attached to Clingendael, the Netherlands Institute of International Relations, explains that several countries have been the target of attacks.

One example is Estonia. In 2007 the websites of government, political parties and banks were offline for days. The attack began when the Estonian government removed a statue dating from the Soviet era. A year later, Georgia’s internet infrastructure came under attack shortly before a physical invasion by Russia. It cannot be determined with certainty in either case who carried out the attack. Kees Homan believes it may have been hackers hired by Russia.

Blind and deaf
Substantial damage can be inflicted relatively easily these days. When its website is down for days, a bank can lose a great deal of money and possibly some customers. It’s much more serious if defensive control systems are taken out and a government is not even aware the enemy is attacking. This is a major goal of cyber attackers, says Homan:

“I think it will mainly be used as a force multiplier – in concert with the use of conventional armed forces, as we saw in Georgia. Cyber attacks can make your opponent blind and deaf and make your military operation significantly easier.”

It seems like a grim picture of the future: groups of hackers softening up a country through its computer systems, followed by a bombardment or a military invasion. The United States apparently considered disabling Libya’s defence systems prior to the bombing raids. Some experts believe China has thousands of cyber soldiers already carrying out continuous attacks on the US and that numerous small countries or rebel groups could do the same. Despite this, not everyone takes the threat equally seriously.

Naive
US security expert and inventor of the firewall, Marcus Ranum, says a small group of cyber soldiers could never defeat a country’s military security systems. He argues that a cyberwar is no different from a conventional war in this respect:

“The rules of logistics and the notion of strategy are the same, whether you're talking about military operations in cyberspace or military operations in the physical world. That's one of my issues with the people who talk about cyberwarfare. They tend to ignore logistics. They tend to ignore the fact that you've got intelligence problems in cyberspace as well. I'm pretty disappointed with how people approach cyberwarfare, because what they're talking about is very naive."

The nature of warfare doesn’t change just because you put the word ‘cyber’ in front of it, he says. Nevertheless, many countries are busy developing protocols for a cyberwar in which computer networks are knocked out and equipment infected with viruses - not only defensive protocols but offensive ones too. According to Kees Homan, the Netherlands has a cyberwar protocol just as the US does. That means we’re not talking science fiction, we’re talking about the present day.

(imm)