Recent Cyberwar Spectrum and Its Analysis

Abstract

War is an organized, armed, and often prolonged conflict that is carried on between states, nations or other parties. Every war instance includes some basic components like rising conditions, battlespace, weapons, strategy, tactics, and consequences. Recent developments in the information and communication technologies have brought about changes on the nature of war. As a consequence of this change, cyberwar became the new form of war. In this new form, the new battlespace is cyber space and the contemporary weapons are constantly being renovated viruses, worms, trojans, denial-of-service, botnets, and advanced persistent threat. In this work, we present recent cyberwar spectrum along with its analysis. The spectrum is composed of the Estonia Attack, Georgia Attack, Operation Aurora, and Stuxnet Worm cases. The methodology for analysis is to identify reasons, timeline, effects, responses, and evaluation of each individual case. Moreover, we try to enumerate the fundamental war components for each incident. The analysis results put evidences to the evolution of the weapons into some new forms such as advanced persistent threat. Another outcome of the analysis is that when approaching to the end, confidentiality and integrity attributes of information are being compromised in addition to the availability. Another important observation is that in the last two cases, the responsive actions were not possible due to the lack of the identities of the offending parties. Thus, attribution appears as a significant concern for the modern warfare. The current sophistication level of the cyber weapons poses critical threats to society. Particularly developed countries that have high dependence on information and communication technologies are potential targets since the safety of the critical infrastructures like; healthcare, oil and gas production, water supply, transportation and telecommunication count on the safety of the computer networks. Being aware of this fact, every nation should attach high priorities to cyber security in his agenda and thus behave proactively.