Cyber warfare is a situation when the world is at a cyber war (using computer and internet to conduct warfare) where hackers aided by the govt. will try to compromise enemy nations data sharing infrastructure (Defense systems, Power grid, Stock exchange, Water supply) which will damage the target country to the farthest extent possible. Cyber Attacks can be of any type. It can be series of DDOS attacks or data manipulation rather than theft or destruction.
In Cyberspace battles are fought in nanoseconds, Cyber attacks can be on a large scale(ddos) or may be discrete like the enemy has entered your system and manipulated your data and may have installed a backdoor, you come to know about it later. Sometimes the enemy hits you so bad that you become defenseless and are forced to surrender so precautions are necessary. Attacks can be made on Military as well as private networks, the target could be a Defense system or Air traffic control or may be a Power grid.
Governments all over the world are training cyber warriors and preparing them for the cyberwar. We all know about the US govt.’s hack attack’s along side the ground operations during Iraq war and the Russian cyber attacks on Estonia.
President Obama issued a cyber security plan to deal with cyber threats to the nation. Many developed and developing countries have recognized the power of the internet and are now securing their systems against security threats. US, UK, Russia, France, China, North Korea, Canada, Germany are reported to have been securing their systems. Analysts and former intelligence officials, say that China and Russia top the list of countries with highly developed cyberwarfare capabilities. They also named Iran and North Korea as countries with known cyber warfare aspirations.
In 2007 McAfee’s annual report stated that about 120 countries are trying to use the internet as a weapon to target their enemy nation’s financial market’s, Govt computer system’s.
Cyber Terrorism is a rising threat now. Intelligence has reported that there is a discrete threat that terrorist groups like ‘Al-Qaeda’ may plan to launch cyber attacks but currently they don’t have the infrastructure and expertise that may do more damage than guns and bullets. Terrorists can get ‘hired guns’ with the resource’s and motives they have. Terrorist’s main aim will be to make a chaos rather than destruction like terrorist may hack a bank and manipulate some accounts data, people will think they lost all their savings which will create a lot of ruckus.
Cyber Terrorism
You must have read about the iranians hacking into the US drones with a 25.95 $ software and viewing their live feed, this can be pretty dangerous to US security. The lame engineers who made the predator drones didnt even encrypt the data huh.. Iranian hackers recently hacked twitter by compromising with some DNS stuff and Google Morroco was also hacked by Pakbugs (Pakistani Hackers).
This is exactly why a great number of non-partisan computer security experts are warning of the danger of Internet voting. Basically, they say that there is no way to secure Internet voting. Yet, there is a move to make that happen in the U.S. First, the overseas military, next the overseas ex-pats, and finally the rest of us. And, we never saw it coming. If and when it becomes the method we use to cast our votes, we will have given up our democracy.
