Pascal Geenens
COMMENTARY: Of all the forms of warfare humans have invented, there’s nothing stranger and more unsettling than modern cyberwarfare. We’re habituated to think of war as a state of conflict with a defined beginning (outbreak), middle (mutual struggle) and end (victory or defeat).
Several decades after the term was first used, we can now say with some certainty that cyberwarfare doesn’t work like this. So, what are cyberwarfare’s distinctive characteristics?
[SC Media Perspectives columns are written by a trusted community of SC Media cybersecurity subject matter experts. Read more Perspectives here.]
Cyberwarfare in the 21st Century feels more epochal, something closer to a permanent state of conflict from which we might never emerge. Cyberwarfare must have started in the 1980s as computer networks expanded their influence but it's not clear that it will ever end in any conventional sense. For geo-politics and human society, this represents a profound change, the effects of which are still underestimated even as negative effects already have manifested.
A dynamic trend in recent kinetic wars is the way hacktivists now flock to digital wars almost as fast as the humans in the firing line are running in the other direction. The ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia offers a good illustration. Wars are traditionally fought with appointed combatants. Hacktivism shows us that anyone with the right skills can be involved in a cyberwar, which potentially creates dangerous instability. Armies take orders and have defined chains of command. Hacktivism lacks this discipline and can pick their targets with minimal accountability.
Contrary to popular opinion, Ukraine v. Russia didn’t start in 2022 – it dates to the early 2000s when Russia started investing in digital warfare capabilities to destabilize its geo-political opponents, including the nascent Ukrainian democracy movement. Analysts were aware of this new capability – a widely discussed example being the cyberattacks on Estonia in 2007 – but believed it was secondary to kinetic war. However, these Russian campaigns were harbingers of a deepening enmity. This pattern has repeated across other geo-political conflicts.
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