Introduction to Cyber-Warfare - Proiect SEMPER FIDELIS

Conclusion and the Futureof Cyber WarfareThis book explored many of the major incidents of cyber warfare over the past decade.Prior to the year 2000, cyber warfare was theorized about, but there was little indication(at least in the public discourse) that it actually occurred. During the late 1990s and early2000s, detractors even claimed cyber warfare would never amount to a serious threat. Sincethen, incidents such as the Russia-Georgia war of 2008, the theft of UAV video feeds publicizedin 2009, the accounts of Stuxnet in 2010, and Anonymous’ support of the Arab Spring in2011 seem to have shifted the debate on cyber warfare from “Is cyber war important?” to“What should we do about cyber war?” One thing we learned while writing this book is thatmany attacks that were theorized about in the 1990s were realized just over a decade later. Wehave examined how the Internet plays a part in real-world conflicts from governments’ use ofthe Internet as propaganda tool (Chapter 4) or to curb internal discord (Chapters 5 and 7) tothe support of physical operations on the ground (Chapters 3 and 10). Nevertheless, the employmentof the Internet as means to political ends is not limited to nation states and theirofficial institutions. Most notably, the Internet crusades of the Anonymous collective and variousaffiliates come to mind. In Chapter 6, the reader caught a glimpse of the consequences ofemerging global, border-transgressing online social networks. Albeit highly prominent in thepast 2 years, it is merely the amplification of the global citizen, who now is more able than everto voice his/her discontent over matters far removed from his/her actual home base. The inherentdangers of the global interconnectedness, which is unfortunately only slowly enteringthe body of common knowledge, are highlighted in mostly criminal and to a lesser extent politicallymotivated social network exploitations. We outline the most prominent mechanismthat makes such an endeavor likely to be highly successful in Chapter 9 with the outline of theRobin Sage experiment. In 2012, 34% of the world population finds itself in the favorable positionto have Internet access—a growth of more than 500% since December 2000. In this book,we were able to touch only marginally how the use of social media by ordinary citizens of thisworld is quickly gaining in its potential to change the world (Chapters 2 and 5). Moreover, itcan be alleged that we focused on the organized, concerted efforts that significantly stood outin the successfulness of their operation—alas, reports about most of them can be found inpopular media outlets. Thus, later chapters (Chapter 8, and all the chapters in Part 3) describeimminent and possible future threats to industrial control systems and other industrial infrastructure.Here we dedicate an entire chapter (Chapter 13) to the highly sophisticated wormStuxnet, which apparently was meant to curb the enrichment of Uranium at Iran’s primaryproduction site—a large high-security site with underground structures that house the cascadehalls.241