War is usually considered absence of peace or presence of a prolonged conflict that involves armed struggle and violence between nations or groups. Till 20th century wars used to be fought either in battle grounds engaging professional or guerilla armies or aerial or naval attacks had been carried out. Although such methods are still being pursued during warfare but in modern time a new kind of war is introduced and being fought, the Cyber War.
In the Cyber war, information technology and communication tools are used to attack the interests of enemy. As in traditional warfare, weapons are used and ground, aerial and naval assaults are conducted against the enemy by professional armies or forces similarly here hackers (the army of Cyber War) penetrate into enemy’s computer to either hack or sabotage information or steal information from thereby using computer technology. Espionage is also carried out through networks. Malicious software is used to sabotage the control system of important military and financial projects. And its domain is Cyberspace.
With all such similarities this warfare is controversial. Unlike traditional kind of war there is no existence of fighting. All disruption is invisible. It can be neither averted nor be detected on time to protect you against enemy’s attack. It does not involve any kind of violence which is the core of war. It does lead to absence of peace but doesn’t cause any violence.
Is it really a war? As Thomas Rid wrote about Cyber War in his article “Think Again, Cyber War” that “It has to be potentially violent, it has to be purposeful, and it has to be political. The cyber attacks we’ve seen so far, from Estonia to the Stuxnet virus, simply don’t meet these criteria”.
When this war has a domain although invisible so why is it so controversial to be declared as warfare? The digital infrastructure of Cyber war helps countries to pursue their interests during warfare and protect them in information ground to either damage the important military and financial digital infrastructure of enemy or get superiority over enemy. As Aerial, naval and armed forces are kept to secure the interests during warfare similarly Cyber army is trained to strike enemy in digital and communication ground.
There is a long list of Cyber war when countries and group struck the enemies and caused them trouble. For understanding whether it is warfare or not we should understand first the definition of warfare. Basically warfare means act of destroying the strength of opponents. And in Cyber war, hostile groups do harm the information and communicational strength of rivals.
Blog post Written by Fahmida Abdul Sattar and You can visit the original article at http://www.thenewstribe.com/