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Journalists love to use the term, but what is a "cyber war" anyway? The first thing I think about is a bunch of script kiddies trying to take over each other's
by FooBarWidget 17y ago
Journalists love to use the term, but what is a "cyber war" anyway? The first thing I think about is a bunch of script kiddies trying to take over each other's IRC channels with netsplits and operator status, and trying to erase each other's hard drives with Sub7.
- roc 17y agoWell, a cyber-strike would be a coordinated digital attack meant to achieve a strategic goal by force. So a cyber war, by extension, would be a prolonged exchange of such strikes. So this could plausibly be one such strike in an on-going conflict that is far more 'real' than script kiddie squabbling. Could have been a penetration attack to steal technological secrets. Could have been a penetration to plant backdoors/loggers for later use. Could be service disruptions to hamper a particular project. (Take down the network serving No Fly List sorts of updates to get a possibly-compromised agent on a plane or over a border.) Could just be a 'recon' attack to see what we have connected and how we react. A sort of digital equivalent to the kinds of 'disruption' that we financed and supported from Okinawa toward China for many years. But I personally find it hard to believe that any state-sponsored cyber 'strike' would be limited to a DDoS on public-facing services. That sounds like a smokescreen at best.