Cyber war came before the real thing
What better way to cripple a nation your trying to topple than to take down key websites in the country.
That's what happened recently in the country of Georgia, just before Russian forces invaded its neighbor.
The New York times reports
an American security researcher picked up data streams with coded
messages, which eventually lead to distributed denial of service
attacks. A number of government sites were down weeks before the
attacks began, and some Internet services were so barraged with the
requests that many Georgian servers were overloaded.
As the story suggests, this could lead to a trend in future skirmishes,
especially with powerful countries who depend heavily on computer
technology. It seems reasonable that a way to slow down the opposition
would be to render their Internet service nearly useless.
Of course, Russia has said it was not behind the DDOS attacks. And it
would be disturbingly difficult to determine who was behind it, making
an online attack fairly easy to get away with, at least at this point.
The next question, however, is whether or not a cyber war will
eventually replace conventional war as a means to disrupt a warring
nation. By cutting off the Internet from a world power, you are
theoretically shutting it down for a certain period of time. With so
many transactions occurring online, how would the U.S. cope if no one
could do business via the Internet? There are hackers in every
developed nation, and even some in developing ones, who could put
together an attack like this, assuming they had enough financial
backing.
Maybe computer programmers will become newest first line on the
warfront. At least that would be one way to limit meaningless human
causalities.
