Abstract
The chapter explores the concept of information and cyber operations. It identifies the role of cyberspace operations in modern military conflicts and addresses Western and Russian strategic approaches of using cyberspace as an emerging platform of modern warfighting. Since the end of the 19th century, the world entered the information age in which distribution of power is mostly dependent on the amount of information a state owns and knowledge of tools and tricks to use it. Information superiority is a power element and vulnerability at the same time. With the technological revolution, creation, distribution, and usage of information was simplified, but securing of created and distributed information became more difficult. Information itself can be used in different ways, starting from simple communication to military operations. Considering the fact that ‘military power alone is insufficient to achieve sustainable political objectives', information operations and employment of information capabilities has been included at all stages of modern military operations.
TopCyberwarfare Theory And Its Place In Modern World Politics
Everything that exists has both theoretical and practical direction, when we talk about cyber warfare, we must first explain what event we are dealing with. It is the use of digital attacks by one country on another (computer viruses or hacker cyber attacks) to damage, liquidate, and destroy computer infrastructure.
There are differing opinions among experts regarding the term “cyber warfare”. Some say that the term “cyber” is incorrect because to date no cyber-attack can be described as “war”. The second part of the experts believes that this is an appropriate name because a cyberattack causes physical harm to people and objects in the real world.
Is cyber-attack considered war production? It depends on many factors - what they do, how they do it, and what damage they do to the target object. The qualification of the attacks must be of considerable scale and severity. Attacks by an individual hacker, or group of hackers, are not considered cyber if the state does not assist or lead. Nevertheless, the virtual world is still vaguely represented in the direction of cyber-attacks. Some states support hackers in performing malicious actions, this is a dangerous but common trend.
For example, cybercriminals who destroy a bank's computer systems while stealing money are not considered cybercriminals, even if they are from another country, but state-backed hackers do the same thing to destabilize another country's economy.
There is also a difference between the target object and the scale: the destruction of an individual company website is not considered cyber, but the disruption of missile defense systems at the airbase is perceived as cyber. In this case, it is important what weapon the attacker uses. For example, launching a rocket for a data center would not be considered cyber, even if the data center contained secret government records. The use of hackers for espionage or data theft does not involve cyber warfare om and is defined by the qualifications of cyber espionage. There are many dark holes in cyber warfare, but it is impossible to consider all attacks as cyber (Ranger, 2020).
Although there are differing views on how to define “cyber warfare” as a term, many countries today, such as the United States, Russia, Britain, India, Pakistan, China, Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and North Korea, are already They have cyber capabilities for both offensive and defensive operations.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Information Warfare: Attacks on an adversary’s telecommunications and computer networks to degrade the technological systems vital to its defense and economic well-being.
Cyberspace: A metaphor used to describe the global electronic web of people, ideas, and interactions on the Internet, which is unencumbered by the borders of the geopolitical world.
Info War-Tactics: Attacks on an adversary’s telecommunications and computer networks to penetrate and degrade an enemy whose defense capabilities depend heavily on these technological systems.
Cyber-Attack: An attempt to disable computers, steal data, or use a breached computer system to launch additional attacks. Cybercriminals use different methods to launch a cyber-attack that includes malware, phishing, ransomware, man-in-the-middle attack, or other methods.