cyberwarfare: an emerging global risk impacting our society
by Vivek Seth In the context of global risks faced by countries, the risk of materialization of large-scale cyberwarfare has become increasingly prominent in recent years. Broadly speaking, cyberwarfare refers to deliberate cyber-attacks like spreading of computer viruses and hacking by one or a group of nations on another nation state’s technological infrastructure. Key motivations of such attacks include political aspirations to disrupt the operational activities, digital espionage, spreading misinformation, physical sabotage, coercion in decision making process and financial gain at the expense of the target country or international organizations. With an ever-increasing interconnectedness of the world via internet and digital infrastructure, targeted cyber attacks can prove to be an effective tool for causing large scale harm to victim government, military and corporations. Some of the common means of perpetuating cyberattacks include usage of botnets for distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, social engineering, phishing techniques as well as disruptions via insider staff with access to sensitive or critical information systems. A key reason why such attacks are becoming more prevalent is due to their covert nature, as often the outright involvement of participants is not apparent, which is in contrast with conventional military and intelligence exercises. While there has not been a categorically declared cyberwarfare yet, the world has seen a number of incidents that have caused serious disruption to countries’ infrastructures and which are suspected of being carried out by state-sponsored organizations. Some of these events are outlined in the timeline indicated below. Key recent cyberattack events affecting serious disruption to countries’ infrastructure
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Intelligent Risk - April 2020
