What Cyberwar may look like
All the experts agree that one of the next major battlegrounds will be cyberspace. There’s been a bunch of stories lately about how fierce these high tech skirmishes will be. In the U.S., officials say they are daily fighting some 50,000 attacks every day.
Some are from hackers. Others organized criminal gangs. Others are secretly financed by espionage agencies from forign nations.
Think, for example, just what would happen if the Net was totally inaccessible tomorrow. All day.And the next day, too. Forget your Facebok fix. We’re talking an complete halt to online business. Communications, media, medical, insurance and banking centers would be severely disrupted.
I don’t think the average person has a clue as to how serious Net security really is. We’re so dependent on the Internet that a real meltdown would be devastating in ways we can scare imagine.
The New York Times had a piece over the weekend that noted how many countries, including the United States, are developing weapons like “logic bombs” that can be hidden in computers to halt them at crucial times or damage circuitry; “botnets” that can disable or spy on Web sites and networks; or microwave radiation devices that can burn out computer circuits miles away.
It’s an online arms race and Russia and the U.S. are divided about how to deal with the threat of cyberwar. Any agreement on cyberspace presents special difficulties because the matter touches on issues like censorship of the Internet, sovereignty and rogue actors who might not be subject to a treaty.
Want a good backgrounder on this? Read U.S. and Russia Differ on a Treaty for Cyberspace – Series – NYTimes.com.
