An Introduction to Cyber Warfare

With the rise of the cyber age, a new form of warfare has developed: Cyber Warfare. Cyber warfare is practiced by individual hackers, and governments alike. It can spam a large spectrum of seriousness, from the minor threats of everyday spam you get in your email. to the strategical deployment of a virus designed to wipe out Iran's nuclear capabilities. With the increasing networking of, well, everything, cyber warfare poses more and more threats. Look at denial-of-service (DoS) and distributed DOS (DDoS) attacks, for example. DoS are a kind of cyber attack aimed at impeding a designed audience from accessing a network or machine. These attacks can be very mild and inconsequential, as just last night, I was watching a stream on twitch.tv and the streamer got DDoS'd, causing the stream to shut down; or they can be quite severe, as it is possible to DoS a bank's network, making any and all transfers of money impossible to carry out. Now, say this attack is carried out on a larger scale, and instead of one bank being hit, a hacker strikes at a large group of banks. All of a sudden, one hacker may have single handedly stopped a country from functioning for a given period of time. Cyber warfare is extremely dangerous, as we rely more and more on technology for our everyday needs, more and more possible targets start to become apparent. If you follow the news, you will often see cyber attacks being carried out and linked to other nations, as recently the New York Times was hacked by Chinese hackers. There is also a rise in cyber terrorism, and unidentified entities are known to be conducting tests, like collapsing energy reactors in order to create a power outage in a region. Next post, I'll get more specific on some attacks, when I cover Olympic Games, the United States' attempt to cripple Iran by destroying their nuclear power plants with a virus. In short, cyber warfare should not be underestimated. The possibilities to cause destruction with it are immense.