Cyber Warfare: Doing Your Bit

Everyone’s A Soldier In The Digital War.

- Mithun Mohandas

Cyber Warfare is a theatre of war that has been in the news for quite a while but not clearly understood. While both forms of warfare are equally effective not much is known about cyber warfare. Cyber Warfare is simply the application of hacking methods to attack the opponent’s digital resources and thus, affect economical damage or extract intelligence. The average cyber soldier does not fit the image that comes to your mind when you hear the word soldier. And no, we don’t wish to imply that these are script kiddies based out of their parent’s basements either. Cyber warfare has been used effectively for quite some time and is being looked at as the primary means of extracting intelligence.

Militaries around the world have long fathomed the importance that cyber warfare has in the modern world and there have been quite a few publicly known operations as well. And not all of these operations were for military purposes. Some have been targeted towards civilian infrastructure, some acts of cyber warfare have been politically motivated acts of hacktivism, some have been in the private sector as a means of industrial espionage and lastly, certain acts were used as a means of gaining knowledge about the implications of cyber warfare (research, if you will). If you want a more recent example then by the time you are reading this, you’ll have been bombarded quite a bit about the set of DDoS attacks that have been happening since October 20th 2016. The sheer magnitude of this DDoS attack was such that large scale services like Spotify, Twitter, Github, PayPal and others were rendered inaccessible. At the time of writing this, not much has been revealed about the reasons for this attack nor had any entity come forward to own up.

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