The 21st century marks a significant and revolutionary change in field of technology. This development has given a new concept of not only in economical and prosperous means but as well as in warfare means. However, looking at the initial revolution of technology in 21st century, then it can be depicted as the introduction towards internet then conversion into technologies, data collection and now artificial intelligence. All this seems to be positive and it has positive impacts but the point is that all the glitters is not gold. The more beneficial and amazing the virtual or cyber world looks, the more it is darker in reality. The world has witnessed crimes done through cyber weapons. Initially, it escalated with frauds and scams. Simultaneously, these were considered as crimes but at the same time it became common. The first ever cybercrime that is in the records is in 1834 which was telegraph tampering of the French telegraph system in which the financial data was stolen. Another bigger cybercrime recorded in between 1960s-1980s that was an improper malicious form known as phone phreaking which was tp hack the free calls to explore the inner workings of the system. On the same time in 1971 Creeper Virus was introduced that was not a proper malicious but it had the potential to spread through computer systems. However, biggest cyber-attack for the first time ever that became the major headlines at that time in 1982 was the Siberian pipeline gas explosion which later created confusion that rather it was the result of poor construction or actually a cyber sabotage?
Moving on, in 21st century, the dynamics of cyber weapons and crimes transformed into different forms such as social engineering, phishing, man in middle, disk operating system, distributed denial of service , cyber espionage, ransomware attack, attack on critical infrastructure, key loggers, zero day exploit attack, structural query language, advanced persistent threat and such other forms. Another major cyber-attack that was done by DDOS attack in 21st century was the attack on digitalized country Estonia in 2007 and within 5 minutes, the whole country’s economy got collapsed. The defense minister of Estonia stated regarding this that the cyber-attack on Estonia and the nuclear attack on Japan are same but the difference is that Japan knew her enemy and we do not know. Another example of it is the Stuxnet attack in 2010, Duqu attack on 2011 and Flame attack in 2012 on Iran’s nuclear program. This malicious attack was coded specifically to target the computer programming system that was controlling the Uranium enrichment process centrifuges which further resulted in explosion of the centrifuges. This attack took back Iran years back towards its nuclear program development. this series of attack is also known as The Olympic Games. Adding more to such threatening development in technology and cyber competition is the data breaches on Australia from 2018-2024 which includes ransomware attacks, attack on critical infrastructure, information leaks and such other cyber-attacks. According to Philip Hammond: “More and more, modern warfare will be about people sitting in bunkers in front of computer screens, whether remotely piloted aircraft or cyber weapons.”
Such examples demonstrates that how the cyber weapons are spreading threat and insecurity among all states. Not only this, it makes difficult for the targeted side to know its enemy and it does not contain any specific defensive measures and legal work. This is where the point of cyber deterrence questioned. This elaborates that cyber deterrence and can be achieve by all states by making themselves technologically advanced. Adding more to this, Russia and Ukraine war has now further made this clear that it is the part of war.
There is no doubt that cyber warfare and cyber weapons have made easy for states to achieve its objective but it is also marking the alarming situation that the world might face. This highlights that the world seems to be advanced and modern but on the other hand it is falling on a dark side because in counter attacks, states develop more malicious weapons and if spread on internet as Stuxnet did, then it might prevail all over the world and may create a huge loss to other states as well.
Related
