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What is the difference between a cyber-attack and cyber war?
A cyber-attack speaks for itself: It is a hostile intrusion into a network for whatever purpose, sabotage, espionage, criminality, ransomware, that kind of thing.
Cyber warfare is a difficult and I think contested term. I don’t think anybody really knows what it means. And to talk about cyber warfare as something that implies that it is separate and discreet from any other form of warfare, I think is highly misleading.
If we look at real world examples, for example, what’s happening in Ukraine, we see cyber operations being undertaken by both sides all the time as a subset of other belligerent activities. And I think that is probably the most useful way of looking at the distinction.
I think some years back, and certainly in the early days of the internet, there was this sense by many thinkers and strategists that cyber warfare conceived of basically as activities designed to digitally disable an opponent, could in and of itself be decisive
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