So at one point or another, we’ve all heard the maxim that the digital revolution is going to change the way we do everything. Well... once again it has been proven right.
The next victim of the digital age? Ironically, it may be the art of war.
For a moment, forget Operation Shock and Awe and all the recent advancements in military technology… states have been getting better at killing people and blowing stuff up for the last hundred years. Much more novel is the concept of states engaging in “cyber-warfare", and what the implications of such actions might be. There is little doubt that an IT-savvy state could engage in cyber-warfare, but would it constitute the next ‘shot heard round the world?’ How should a state react when its websites are being shut down by another state? Complain? Crash their parliament website? File a brief with the International Court of Justice? Or maybe just bomb the bastards to hell.
Transition to a real world scenario:
Tensions recently flared up in Eastern Europe: Estonia, one of the Soviet Union’s former satellite states, moved a Soviet soldier memorial out of the city center of Tallinn. The Russian government was infuriated and provoked strong and forceful denunciations of Estonia by Russian ministers, who claimed that the removal of the statue discriminated against ethnic Russian citizens. Looting in Tallinn by Ethnic Russians ensued, and so… things got worse.
A basic international dispute over a policy slight- nothing new there.
Except…
On April 27th, a massive month long cyber-offensive began on the websites of Estonia’s banks, parliament, ministries, newspapers, and broadcasters, forcing many of them to shut down. Estonia is highly modernized and relies heavily on IT, and so the attacks remained serious problem. All eyes looked to Russia as the culprit, and the Estonian Foreign Minister even went on television to claim that one of the virus origins was from a computer in the Russian Presidential Administration and several from government computers. Nonetheless, many tech savvy Russian citizens found helpful instructions on how to conduct DDoS attacks on their own, and Estonia has been hammered now for nearly a month.
Whether or not Russia is actually ‘guilty’ is almost irrelevant given the nature of cyber attacks (they are just plain difficult to trace). I think what is most troubling is that there is still no clear idea in the international community on how to respond should a state be caught engaging in such an attack. The Economist was fortunate enough to quote a senior NATO official in Brussels: even
“If a member state's communications centre is attacked with a missile, you call it an act of war. So what do you call it if the same installation is disabled with a cyber-attack?”
Cyber-warfare is not going to replace regular warfare or change the entire international balance of power, but it does pose a new problem to an already troubled international system. As countries continue to modernize, it creates new weaknesses and vulnerabilities that can be taken advantage of… especially in cyberspace.
