Cyber Warfare

The United States is under attack. To be exact, the nation’s power grid is under attack in the form of cyber warfare. On May 21st, 2013 Congressmen Edward J. Markey and Henry A Waxman published a report that provided the findings from information that they had requested from over 150 utility companies (of which 60% responded). More than a dozen utilities reported “daily, constant, or frequent attempted cyber-attacks” (Markey & Waxman) with one utility reporting that they have about 10,000 attempted attacks per month!

Pfleeger, S. Pfleeger, and Margulies (2015) outline possible examples of cyber warfare between Canada and China (p. 844). According to Pfleeger, S. Pfleeger, and Margulies (2015), “the Canadian government revealed that several of its national departments had been victims of a cyber attack…” (p. 844). Eventually, the attack was unofficially traced to a computer in China (p. 844). Cyber warfare can be used negatively and positively. It is evident that China was seeking to gain protected information form Canada. Although a purpose of cyber warfare, it is not a conventional way of obtaining information. Additionally, cyber warfare can be used to collect intelligence on an enemy. Anyone seeking to gather intelligence on another individual or group can launch a cyber attack that gains access to protected files. This could be used to help future militant operations or expose critical information. Lastly, cyber warfare can be used to test systems internally. Acting with no malicious intent, “insiders” can utilizing cyber warfare tactics to attack their own cyber security barriers in order to test the strength of their systems. Seeking to expose the vulnerabilities in a system that contains important assets without actually harming the assets provides the system a diagnosis of what needs to be strengths and fixed. Identifying the problem or threats before an actual attack can ultimately save the protected

In “Cyber war is Already Upon Us” by John Arquilla. Arquilla argues that “cyber war has arrived” and there needs to be focus on what can be done to control it (Arquilla 4). Arquilla provides examples of cyber attacks that he considers to be instances of cyber war to argue his point. To be considered an act of war, an attack must be potentially violent, purposeful, and political (Lecture 20. Slide 5). Many of the attacks that Arquilla refers to were purposeful and political, making them comparable to specific battles within a war. However, they should not be classified as entire wars by themselves because traditionally war is defined as a period of ongoing conflict and not one specific attack. While cyber war is a possibility, nothing in

In order to properly answer the question posed we must first define what cyber-war and cyber-terrorism are. The Oxford Dictionaries defines cyber-war as “The use of computer technology to disrupt the activities of a state or organization, especially the deliberate attacking of communication systems by another state or organization:” Although there is no dictionary definition of cyber-terrorism, The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has defined it as “the use of computer network tools to shut down critical national infrastructures (e.g., energy, transportation, government operations) or to coerce or intimidate a government or civilian population.” The author defines cyber terror as “the intimidation of civilian enterprise through the use of high technology to bring about political, religious, or ideological aims, actions that result in disabling or deleting critical infrastructure data or information.”

Two of the common known attacks on computing systems are the deployment of computer viruses and malware.

Defining cyber-warfare is also important but suffers from the same lack of continuity between United States military branches and government agencies. Schaap lists varying terminology used ranging from the Department of Defense’s definition which states, “the employment of cyber capabilities where the primary purpose is to achieve military objectives or effects through cyber-space” to the Air Force’s definition, “the integrated planning and employment

Most nations today fear terror attacks that include bombing use of reinforcements like machines guns and other firearms. This is because terror attacks most of the times leave many people dead and others disabled while others are left without families. However, there is another attack today in many nations that can be destructive like a terror attack and this is the cyber-attack and threats. Cyber-attacks can be responsible for large mass destructions by making all systems connected to cyber networks fail to work (Rhodes 20). An example is the Morris worm that affected the world cyber infrastructures and caused them to slow down to a position of being impractical. Therefore, as a result of these cyber-attacks resources are being established and designed to help counter the attacks.

A lot of opinions and meanings has been given to the word “Cyberterrorism”. Some of these meanings and definitions varies. In this light, Gordon and Ford (2003) are concerned that when 10 people define cyberterrorism and nine of the given answers are different, and these 10 people represent different government agencies tasked with safeguarding national assets and infrastructure, then it becomes a critical issue.

The drawback of Estonia's information technology framework was that its defensive protocol was not much secure and could be easily hacked. Moreover, the country was much depended on internet.

Cyber warfare is a battle without causalities, a war waged only by written words, fought digitally by those who are bent at disrupting the infrastructure of a nation built on sweat, labor and concrete. Digital battles that are being fought not for money, not for a simple website defacement proclaiming you are the most ‘l33t hax0r on the interwebs’. One of the most major, yet under reported example of this; a lowly worm named Stuxnet. A worm, by the most mundane of definitions, is a self-replicating program, usually malicious, and whose

To understand the business of malware, one must understand how malware has evolved in the past twenty-five years. Malware, which includes all kinds of malicious software, was originally created to show the weaknesses of computers. The first type of malware, created in 1986, was a virus called “Brain.A. Brain.A was developed in Pakistan, by two brothers - Basit and Amjad. They wanted to prove that PC is not secure platform, so they created virus that was replicating using floppy disks” (Milošević). Even today malware is still used to check the security of machines.

with 1,000 PCs or more now experience a virus attack every two to three months -

There are several different forms of cyber weapons, all of which can be used for either an attack or espionage. There are principally five common practices. The first of three attacks that will be examined is spoofing.

There are special viruses that creates different types of malicious problems on a network or computer, for instance it will create or open programs to perform tasks. Viruses is also used for denial of service attacks, password cracking and many more. This can be fought against by having a reliable protection service; it is safer if this is taken from the provider itself.

Kaspersky Lab, a Russian based private equity company, is Europe’s largest software company, providing anti-virus software for individual, corporate and mobile users (Kshetri, 2011). Kaspersky’s product line includes software applications for protecting systems against malware, viruses, worms, Trojans, spyware, adware, and e-mail spam. In addition, KL offers firewall products, consulting, implementation, software development and support services (Kshetri, 2011).