preview

Cyber Warfare And Its Effects On The World

Good Essays

Boom! The kinetic effect of a two-thousand pound “GBU-31” military designated “MK-84” bomb, possibly with a “BLU-109” penetrator on the nose cone with an embedded global positioning system guidance kit provides obvious visible damage—somebody, or something, just fractured into smaller pieces. The same is not necessarily the case with bellicose actions in the cyber dimension—at least not at first look. Senior leaders as a whole have largely ignored cyber warfare’s catastrophic potential due to the initial invisible physical effects and huge costs associated with protecting our systems and information. As our reliance on technology grows as exponentially as the technology improves, more people are finally showing an awareness of the “silent boom’s” threat and its actual fracturing potential, in part due to protagonists like Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake and their continued warn of cyber war’s devastating potential for first, second, and tertiary effects.
Clarke and Knake use a mixed method research approach in Cyber War to support their hypothesis that offensive prowess is meaningless without solid defense in cyberspace, and that the United States need immediately fix our defensive cyber shortfalls, or face apocalyptic doom. Specifically, the authors define ‘cyber war’ as “actions by a nation state to penetrate another nation’s computers or networks for the purposes of causing damage or disruption.” This infers that they are really talking about ‘warfare’ and

Get Access