Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Cyberwarfare

There are a lot of things people don’t know about cyberwarfare, and a group of experts is warning against a scenario where a powerful country launches cyberattacks against other countries and their allies to launch a war.

In an article on the Network World website, Carolyn Duffy Marsan says the experts from the National Defense University were part of a panel at the Cyber Infrastructure Protection Conference. Those experts stressed that it is critical for the private sector to realize it will be a target of future cyberwarfare.

“Our adversaries are looking for our weaknesses,” Dan Kuehl, professor of information operations at the National Defense University, said at the conference. “We conduct military operations that are increasingly information dependent and becoming more so. We have a global society that is increasingly dependent on critical infrastructure, and those infrastructures are increasingly interconnected in a global economy.”

In the article, Duffy Marsan lists 10 things most of the private sector does not know about cyberwarfare, including:

1. You need to win the first battle.
2. The first battle could be over in nanoseconds.
3. Cyberwarfare may involve subtle, targeted attacks rather than brute force.
4. The enemy’s goal may be to cause chaos rather than destruction.
5. Data manipulation, rather than data theft or destruction, is a serious threat.
6. Private networks will be targets.
7. When private sector networks are hit, the Defense Department will assume control.
8. Private networks might be used to launch a cyberattack.
9. Don’t ignore the insider threat.
10. Cyberwarfare is warfare.

To read the full article, click here: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/060809-cyberwarfare.html