Answer

Cyber War and Its Future

Cyber war is the employment of digital attacks, such as hacking and computer viruses, by a nation to unsettle or disrupt crucial information/data of another country’s computer systems, with the intention of causing destruction, death, and damage (Finlay, 2018). With the world remaining filled with top secret hackers, digital weapons, and spies, cyber warfare is progressively becoming commonplace and a dangerous characteristic of international conflicts.

To me, outright cyber war looks like any other normal warfare, ranging from restricted clashes to full-on wars and the impact of such wars can vary by severity and target. I believe that computer systems are not the eventual targets of cyber wars, but instead targeted for their part in managing real-world infrastructure, such as power grids or airports. For instance, the U.S. experienced the worst case of cyber war when it saw attackers combine destructive attacks that were focused upon U.S.’s critical infrastructure with data manipulation on immense scales. A combination of ongoing cyber war arms race along with insufficient policies governing online conflicts imply that there is real danger that incidents of cyber warfare could escalate rapidly beyond control in the near future, allowing for more incidences of cyber wars.

There are various differences between cyber war and other kinds of statecraft and conflicts. To determine whether an attack ought to be regarded as an act of cyber warfare, factors like the hackers’ identity, what the hackers are doing, how they are doing it, and the damage they cause are to be considered. Cyber wars are serious conflicts between nations Therefore, attacks by groups or individual hackers are not cyber wars unless they are directed and aided by a state (Yong-Soo & Aßmann, 2016). As aforementioned, the scale and nature of the targets are equally determining factors: disfiguring an individual firm’s website is not likely to be regarded as an act of cyber war, yet deactivating a missile or canister defense system at a country’s airbase would somewhat be considered as a cyber war. The weapons employed in a cyber war also distinguish cyber war from other wars. Shooting a missile at a company’s information or data centre would not be regarded as a cyber war, regardless of whether government records were contained in the centre (Gartzke & Lindsay, 2017). Making use of hackers to steal or spy data would not be considered as cyber war, but may be considered as cyber espionage. Whereas other forms of statecraft and conflicts are characterized by use of physical force, cyber wars may not necessarily involve such forces.