There are so many different battlefields that humanity has fought on throughout history. First, people fought on land and battled in arctic regions, deserts, jungles, mountains, and cities/settlements. Then, mankind fought in the oceans and seas.
Then we fought in the air, and some people think we might fight in space. Now, there is a new frontier that people will be fighting in that makes security in the digital area more important than ever before: cyberwarfare with the latest battlefield being cyberspace!
Defining Cyberwarfare
So how do we define cyberwarfare? Well, there are plenty of different available definitions, but here is a definition from Fortinet, a modern cybersecurity company that also works to provide plenty of information on cybersecurity to the public:
Cyberwarfare is typically defined as a set of actions by a nation or organization to attack countries or institutions' computer network systems with the intention of disrupting, damaging, or destroying infrastructure by computer viruses or denial-of-service attacks. - Fortinet
When an organization or country tries to attack computer systems in a way that will damage necessary digital systems, it can be considered cyber warfare.
This is a pretty vague definition, but to be fair, it has only been very recently that the term has become popular and people have tried to define cyberwarfare.
One of the earliest definitions was one offered by Mariarosaria Taddeo back in the year two thousand twelve in his article, An analysis for a just cyber warfare:
The warfare grounded on certain uses of ICTs within an offensive or defensive military strategy endorsed by a state and aiming at the immediate disruption or control of the enemy's resources, and which is waged within the informational environment, with agents and targets ranging both on the physical and non-physical domains and whose level of violence may vary upon circumstances.
However, some, like cybersecurity expert Eugene Kaspersky, argue that the definition of cyber warfare should only apply to attacks on government systems for political reasons and that other attacks should be referred to as “cyberterrorism”, which is referred to by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as “premeditated, politically motivated attack against information, computer systems, computer programs and data, which results in violence against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.“
While these aspects of cyberwarfare are vague, there is one thing that is not vague when it comes to cyberwarfare: our important systems that depend on computers or are at least made more efficient by computers should be protected from attacks that could leave them crippled!
One act of war that happened recently in the United States of America is a series of cyberattacks perpetuated by Russian hackers that harmed U.S. power grids back in 2022.
During these attacks, the President of the United States, Joe Biden, stated that the White House and the US government had “evolving intelligence that the Russian government is exploring options for potential cyberattacks.”
This series of attacks showed how a hostile state could strike important civilian infrastructure from a distance on the digital frontier…