Cyberwarfare Part 1 (A post I have been procrastinating on)

Well this post has been in the works for a couple of week now. I have been procrastinating on a epic level about finishing this off. However the universe decide to give me a kick in the backside in the form of these related recent articles (all links to separate slashdot stories)

So, in recent times, there has been a lot of talk of digital warfare, internet wars, cyberwar and so forth. The most recent being the aforementioned. The general idea behind them is all the same, we have a strategy/army/assets/whatever for cyberwarfare. What happens when warfare goes from being about things in the real world to things in the digital world?

So let's start from the start shall we? What is modern warfare? (apart from a terrible pun on a pretty good video game) War as a concept is fairly simple. Two nation states (in general) disagree on something and wish to resolve the issue. So basically they start blowing each other up until they get bored or one party is very very dead. Yes, that is a gross oversimplification, but the concept holds. Now, onto the crux of the matter: What is Cyberwafare?

Cyberwar (which is the term I shall be using from now on, because I think it's the coolest) is essentially a war fought in the digital realm. This is generally in tandem with conventional warfare with the aim of disabling digital assets. There could also be political goals, achieved by defacing websites and so on, but IMHO the main goal is the destruction of digital assets.

Well, this is all pretty fine and dandy when the war is being carried out by nation states, because there is some inherent chain of command and somebody who would be responsible for ordering these attacks. However, this is not always the case with cyberwar. Now you may ask "why this is possible?"

Good question. The thing with conventional war (ignoring any peace negotiations) is that the winner is the side with the most and/or better equipment and/or training. There is the main point where cyberwar becomes so much easier. To build a real army you need to train people to drive tanks and fly planes and shoot guns and blah blah blah. To build a cyber army, you need to teach people how download a program and run it.

Here the "army" is recruited by word of mouth and because there is no physical danger caused by participating in this attack the number of people who join in are much more numerous. However, we do fall into an interesting problem: who is responsible for this attack, which is essentially tantamount to an act of war?

The answer to the question is ill-defined at best. An prime example would be the recent attack on the Playstation Network (another blog post I will finish soon). First Sony said it was Anonymous, who then claimed it wasn't them, but then it later turned out the be a "faction" (for lack of a better word) of anonymous. So here we see no chain of command and the leaders of the group had no idea what the other members were upto.

And there in lie the first complications of cyberwar. First off, we have the ability to engage in cyberwar. ConvenConventional warfare requires a substantial amount of resources, which are pretty much never available to the average individual. In the cyber realm, all you need is an Internet connection and possibly some more people to help out, or just their computers (whole other problem there, which I will cover later). And then there is the problem of accountability. At best you get an IP address(es) for the attacking platform(s) which may just be under the control of the attacker (again, to be covered in more detail in another post) and thus may not yield anything useful.

Now, this post is getting pretty long and falling into TL;DR territory. That and I really don't want to write anything more at this point in time. So, I will end here and will pick this up later (note the "Part 1" in the title of the post).