Here we are, just a few years into the new Millennium and already we have discovered there are two new kinds of warfare.
First, is the one that is so visually horrific. It is the one being waged by Al Qaeda against anyone who is not Al Qaeda. This is a war of terror and everyone gets it instantly. It is marked by towering infernos, rubble and dead bodies. It has the drama of walls of flame and the mutilation of innocent civilians. Everyone sees it and gets it and understands why the world would be a better place if we could figure out how to bring it to an end.
Second and more recently, is a much less dramatic assault as the International Herald Tribune points out, Russia has the become the first nation to use cyber assaults on another nation. It's three waves of cyber attacks on little Estonia can hardly be called horrific. But, as the Herald Tribune points, out, they are acts of a new kind of "virtual War, one in which there can be real victims. While, there are no walls of flames and only one dead body so far, we have just entered a new era defined by a new danger. Even my Estonian friends consider what has happened so far to be merely inconvenient. Business and e-government are slowed. The tiny country is small enough that it can cut off international internet communications and survive without irretrievable losses. For those reasons, most people in the US and most of the West frown at what has happened, but they are not terribly alarmed. Even inside Estonia, life goes on pretty much as it did before the cyber attacks.
But, if you think about it, this latter form of assault could be as devastating as more dramatic acts of terror. Russia has a 100-year history filled with incidents of it bullying smaller neighbors as well as its own dissident citizens. Estonia well remembers that the Russians can be marsh harsher than what has happened so far.
But we all need to remember that weapons of warfare always begin as primitive things. The first three cyber assaults launched by one country against another are probably the most primitive that the world will experience. Now that it has been done with some success bad guys, like Russia are likely to get a lot better at it and the targets of such assaults are likely to get a lot bigger and be located a lot further in the west.
Estonia can protect its banks and e-government and law enforcement facilities just by shutting down external access for a while. What would happen if such an attack were launched on the United States. If this country shuts down its cyber borders then world trade ges most seriously hampered.
But again, cyber attacks are new and primitive from what they will become. If you let your imagination wander for just a bit, you can see a very frightening scenario unfolding. Picture the shuffling of personal, medical and financial data records exonerating criminals and tainting citizens above suspicion. Picture the corruption of IRS data, the mixing of hospital prescriptions between patients, the calling up of police and fire resources, the destruction of email and so on.
None of this can be accomplished today. It will take some time and work. But it's a good guess that right now, the bad guys are on the case, while governments are scratching their headson what to do about this and most people are not considering for the most part, that Russia's little assault on Esnia has actually made the world a much more dangerous place than it already was.
