Critical Issues of Cyber Warfare:
1. When is it warfare? –
According to some war historians, an attack should be taken by uniformed military members of the attacking country and must be acknowledged by the attacked country as a military action to be considered as warfare. If this idealogy is considered, the attack on Estonia cannot be stated as an act of war. The attack may have been incited by an organized group of people and was not recognized as military action by any nation.
2. How likely is it? –
Sommer and Brown believe that there will never be a true cyberwar while offering several reasons including the difficulty in predicting the true effects of a cyberattack. They say that an attack may be less powerful but may have a more extensive outcome because of the interconnectedness of the systems. They believe that there is no strategic reason as to why someone would limit to only a single class of weaponry. At the same time, they also claim that cyberweapons when blended with the conventional ones can easily multiply the damage.
Cyberweapons, similar to the conventional ones may disrupt a population’s ability to function and weaken the economy but the damage due to cyberattacks can be recovered faster than those from the conventional attacks
3. What are the appropriate reactions to cyberwar? –
Estonia’s Ekelan Tikk and Prescott Winter believe that it is difficult to prepare for a cyberwar because there are, yet, no set rules to engage in a cyberwar, and how to use private-sector networks to re-route the traffic or shut down the attacks. Governments are aware of how to negotiate treaties and engage in diplomacy during the conventional wars, but they are completely clueless as to how confrontations between nations would leverage cooperation or intensify int cyberwar. Some think that increasing monitoring infrastructures for cyber activities is a good way to guard against unwelcoming behavior.
4. Other policy, ethical and legal issues –
There are several myriad policies, ethical and legal issues that must be considered if cyber warfare is to be a feasible strategy.
(i) Does a kill switch make sense? –
There have been developments worldwide to enforce a variation of kill switches into the cyber-infrastructure. For example, Australia has implemented a voluntary code of practice, known as iCode. It uses an extreme threat response for Australian ISPs to shut down parts of the cyber-infrastructure.
Similarly, in the United States, a bill known as ‘Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset(S3480)’ was introduced by the state to increase security in cyberspace and prevent attacks that could disrupt the nation’s economy.
(ii) Do existing national compacts apply to cyber warfare? –
There is a basic difference in the security approach from one country to another. For example, the European Privacy Directive allows its citizens the ownership of their personal information, but no such ownership is guaranteed in the United States. The question is how to overcome these differences so that information can be easily shared between the allies fighting a cyberwar?
In a NATO meeting, the member countries agreed that a cyber attack on any of them would trigger a response from all of them.
(iii) Does release of defensive information help the attackers? –
It is known that an attacker learns by observing the changes to the nature of the system by repeatedly attacking that system. So how can information be shared without assisting the attacker?
(iv) Is cyberwar only a military problem? –
McGraw and Arce suggest that cyber-security is an intricate network of interlaced cultural, diplomatic, economic, and social issues. The principles of conventional warfare and political debates do not fit with the unbounded internet because it is impossible to enforce the security rules established by a single nation or alliances.
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