The Oxford English dictionary’s definition of cyberwarfare is: "The use of computer technology to disrupt the activities of a state or organization, especially the deliberate attacking of information systems for strategic or military purposes."

Cyberwarfare is tricky because at the time of the incident, people have no idea who has started the attack and what the intentions are.

Sometimes there are no reasons at all. This creates a giant web of confusion among people; that’s why the very first reaction to this kind of situation is silence. In a majority of cases, no one steps up to claim responsibility for the attack. Countries can open the doors of speculation on the basis of raw guess and current geopolitical situation, but there are no concrete accusations. The reason behind the absence of any tracks is that the states are quite deft at brushing them off on the back of enormous resources and availability of expert talent. Also, you cannot prove that a state is directly involved in the attack, even if you can track down the perpetrators. The hackers can be individual contractors that have been hired by a state on the condition that they will not disclose who had hired them for the job. 

Still, some stories keep circulating across the states about cyberwarfare, and some of them are quite scary. What will happen if state-sponsored hackers will have enough power to blackout an entire country by executing multiple cyber-attacks across the country? What if they will infiltrate banks and freeze different ATM machines across countries to jam the flow of cash? Perhaps they will succeed in shutting down the airports and shipping firms. Ports will be closed and factories will be put under lockdown because hackers will take control of the power plants. They will go on to paralyze airports as well as hospitals. All these scary stories start proliferating whenever a major cyber attack occurs. 

Once, it was a thought or a mere fantasy that hacking could disrupt entire systems of the state rather than being just a tool for plunder and loot, but now we see that hacking can really disrupt states’ operations. 

If we want to understand what cyberwarfare is and how it started, we should give a brief read to its origins. It is worth understanding how the world is defining this. The term itself is decades old and was first chronicled in Thomas Rid’s history Rise of the Machines . There were talks of automatic weapons and flying cars. Then came the idea of robotic warfare with the concept of a terminator who goes on a killing spree. In 1993 the think tank RAND floated the idea of how military hackers would be used in future for attacking the computers of the enemy that they were using for command-and-control. 

The prospect of a full-on cyber war evolved with the rise in IT power of China, the United States, and Russia. There are lots of other countries such as North Korea, Iran and Saudi Arabia that have already hopped on the bandwagon.

Cyberweapons are getting more sophisticated with the dawn of each day. They are now more aggressive and fast as states have been backing them with huge resources. So far, a mega cyber-attack on critical infrastructures of countries has not happened but the possibility of an attack in the near future cannot be ruled out.

Russian, China and Iran are seen as making considerable progress in the field of cyberwarfare to break the hegemony of the United States in the world. They are now inching toward challenging the status of the United States by defeating her in the cyber world, knowing that the United States leads the world in the domain of cyberwarfare. Where these three countries are moving toward fulfilling their designs, the United States is also creating a robust and offensive-oriented cyber doctrine that would turn out to be a super tough shield in the wake of an attack, and would also prepare a powerful response in a short span of time. This competition tells us that cyber warfare is going to change its way and become more aggressive and destructive in the near future. 

There have been numerous conflicts of interests and an enormous difference of opinion among world powers. Russia dislikes the policies of the United States and she has been pushing forward the idea of the so-called national sovereignty. The Kremlin is frustrated because the United States is ever ready to combat any plan to challenge its writ. In addition, Russia hates freedom of speech and dislikes the meddling of the United States to support freedom of speech across the world. Russia has gone to the extent of saying that it would cut off itself from the global internet and form its own national Internet if the United States didn’t stop. 

Russia and the United States have also been engaged in probing each other’s power sectors. Experts suspect that they might have succeeded in planting malicious codes into the systems so that they can control the power sectors if an all-out war breaks out. China is not lagging behind in the cyber world. China harbors the same ambitions as Russia and appears to be fed up with the unilateralism of the United States. China, just like Russia, loves the idea of state censorship. China is blocking access to lots of international websites, and also wants to follow the idea of a national internet. It has executed multiple crackdowns on anti-government speeches on the internet.

There is a third factor that has significantly changed the equation of cyberwarfare. Iran is also fed up with the hegemony of the United States, and she wants to inflict damage on the United States from behind the scenes. 

Russian and China are on their way to developing sophisticated cyber weapons for future usage. Similarly, the United States, Israel, and France are also very active among the nation-states in leading the way in the cyber world. Well, this doesn’t prove that all these countries have started using cyberweapons against other countries, but they can use them if they get caught in a conflict with one another. If we can recall, Stuxnet was a joint venture of the United States and Israel to reverse the progress of the nuclear program of Iran. 

Cyberweapons used by the state are no different than the weapons used for criminal attacks by hackers. Social engineering already has a dedicated a chapter in this book and one of the many cyber weapons to be used.

Stuxnet was a perfect example of a cyber weapon. It was discovered in 2010 and was made of multiple layers of attack to ensure maximum loss on the part of the enemy. The manner it happened is still a matter of debate among cybersecurity experts, but a majority of them agree that it was a USB that someone either knowingly or unknowingly inserted into an air-gapped system and it infected the Iranian nuclear power programmer pushing it decades behind from where it has reached. The malware in the USB drive made use of multiple zero-day exploits and was made as such to hunt down the software that ran and controlled the centrifuges. Once it had located the software of centrifuges, it spans them faster than its normal speed and that too in an undetected manner. The speed of the centrifuges remained faster than normal for a period of several months and eventually, the centrifuges broke. Stuxnet affected around 1000 machines. 

No one officially claimed responsibility for the attack but people across the world believe that it was a state-sponsored program and a joint venture by the United States and Israel. The interesting thing is that no country that was accused denied the attack. Stuxnet is an all-time famous example of a lethal cyberweapon that silently killed the nuclear power programmer of Iran inflicting a loss of millions of dollars on Iran. 

Another example comes from Russia that remains accused of several state-sponsored cyberattacks. Russia has faced accusations of designing and mounting some pretty grave cyberattacks against Ukraine. The most notorious of the attacks is the BlackEnergy attack that resulted in rendering around 700,000 houses without power in 2015. Another one is the NotPeya malware that turned out to be ransomware but in reality, it was made as such to destroy the computer systems it infected. 

North Korea has also been in the news for its cyberattacks. It has a turbulent relationship with the United States at the diplomatic especially because the latter is an adamant opponent of its nuclear programmer. North Korea doesn’t have the power to compete in the United States at the economic and even the nuclear level so it has taken this new approach of competing in cyberspace. Cyber experts say that North Korea has been involved in some pretty dangerous cyberattacks. They have tried to form a link between North Korea and the Lazarous Group. The most notorious of the attacks that had generated news headlines for the days to come was the attack on Sony Pictures entertainment. 

Hackers broke into the network of Sony Pictures Entertainment and stole a huge amount of confidential documents from their office and afterward posted them online in the coming weeks. This exposed the documents to the masses from journalists and common people to cybercriminals who could possibly use the information to maximize their financial gains. Journalists poured through the huge amount of documents and reported almost everything the papers contained. Most of the documents carried details of a recent film by Sony Pictures Entertainment but there were plenty of papers that exposed the data of the employees. 

There were more than one report by the US government that linked the cyberattack to North Korea, and there were pretty solid reasons to think so because North Korean government had shown displeasure toward Sony Pictures because of a film it had produced.  The film, named The Interview, was an action-comedy that revolved around an assassination plot of Kim Jong Un, the ruler of North Korea. 

What actually happened in Sony Pictures was peculiar, to say the least. The employees of Sony Pictures reached their office one Monday morning and tried to log into their computer. They were taken aback from what they had seen on the screen. There was a picture of a neon red skeleton that greeted them. The screen showed them the following words: #Hacked by #GOP. The group threatened Sony Pictures to release a huge amount of data if the company officials didn’t accept their request. There was more than one statement from the GOP group.

Each message from the Guardian of Peace group accompanied links to download the data that they had stolen from Sony Pictures networks. The day the attack happened, the FBI released a memo warning companies about the entry of a new kind of malware. Even after the passage of days and weeks, the employees at Sony Pictures couldn’t log into their old computers because the company officials were not sure if they had completely removed the malware from the system or not. 

Cyberwarfare has considerably evolved over the past few years from being a theoretical concept to a practical thing. The destructive nature of cyberweapons has been growing at a lightning-fast pace, thanks to the rising ace of cyberattack tools and cyber mercenary groups. 

Cyberweapons can inflict unprecedented damage to the economic infrastructure of a country. Now the warfare has changed its shape and it is being conducted in the cyber realm. Military leaders are now brainstorming to create new lines of defense against the attacks in cyberspace. They are now developing intelligent systems to safeguard their assets that remain in the cyberspace. 

There has been a significant rise in the number of cyberattacks, and now hackers have access to an arsenal of powerful and automated cyber weapons. The weapons range from denial of service attacks to dictionary attack weapons that are designed as such to try out a wide range of password combinations to log into a network system. Another method is social engineering that revolves around harvesting key information from the employees of a government or a corporation. 

The scale of the destruction of a cyber weapon is so wide that it is pretty hard to calculate what amount of loss it is capable of inflicting. For example, the WannCry ransomware infected around 300,000 computers in around 150 countries. The number of affected computers was great and the radius it covered was amazing, to say the least. 

The enormity and vastness of the attack have made defenses against these kinds of attacks a matter of great concern. Militaries around the world are now preparing themselves for a new battlefront. They have started to understand by now that it is not just a matter of technological race but a question of how much resources do you have and how brilliant is your manpower. It requires considerable time and hours long coding to assess the source of an attack and the solution to prepare a solid defense to the attack. That’s where the problem lies. Militaries around the world have hardly the manpower that is required to carry out such kind of attacks. In fact, there has been a serious shortfall of cybersecurity workers around the world. 

From the Sony Pictures attack, we can deduce the fact that it is not easy to respond to a cyberattack right away. In fact, it is difficult to guess the timing of the attack. When Sony Pictures employees saw the screen created by the hackers, all the documents had already been stolen and uploaded on the internet. The screen was just a kind of intimation that they had been attacked. They might not have known about the attack had the hackers not displayed the message on the screens. 

The first problem is the detection of the attack. In some cases, the attack is visible. For example, if the cyberattack is made on a power plant, it is easier to detect. Still, it takes considerable time and effort to locate the origin of the attack and even if you find out the origin of the attack, it is hard to fix responsibility on a government if the latter doesn’t claim it or outright deny it. 

There have been attempts by countries to beef up defenses against a potential cyberattack. One such example of preparation for cyberwarfare is the Locked Shields exercise that NATO has been running for quite some time. There is a country named Berylia in the scenario that is a fictional member state of NATO and has been floating in the North Atlantic. This state has a somewhat tough relationship with Crimsonia, the rival state. Crimsonia is supposed to be located near the eastern side of Europe. The project is being operated by the Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence of NATO and is currently the largest and one of the most complex international technical defense exercises that involve around 900 participants from a total of 25 nations. 

Each year a bunch of national teams participates in the games, out of which one is from NATO itself. NATO has been conducting this kind of exercise for the past few years and this has made it crystal clear that cyberwarfare is no more a fantasy and it has moved from the theoretical realm to the practical realm. Not just NATO, individual countries are also spending a huge amount of sum on improving their capacity to defend themselves in the wake of cyberwarfare and also to come back with an overwhelming response to deter and defeat the enemy. The United States, China and Russia top the list of the nations that boast of some pretty advanced capabilities in the field. 

The 2015 hacking attack on the power sector of Ukraine that had left hundreds of thousands without power turned out to be a wakeup call for governments around the world. The attack showed the potential of a cyber weapon and its importance in a traditional warfare. Just imagine if a country loses all its power amidst a traditional attack by its neighbor. It means complete annihilation or surrenders in a matter of hours before the enemy. The country that has the most sophisticated cyber technology can wipe out the other countries using the Internet.

Since the attack on Ukraine’s power sector, countries have started giving full attention to the importance of the development of cyber weapons and defenses. Just like every year, this year the teams were given the task to protect Berylia’s major military airbase from any kind of cyberattacks. The contending teams have to defend everything thing on the base such as the main office, the personal computers that had Windows operating systems, Mac operations system, Linux operations system, email accounts and all the major or minor servers. The teams were also given the task to defend the systems that controlled the power sector and the office that controlled military air traffic. Other facilities that came under the defense were military surveillance drones and the control offices that directed the fuel of supply to and from the airbase. The basic idea behind the exercise was to reinforce the concept that all individual systems and offices that are inside or outside of the facility but are somehow linked to it should be protected as they can be a potential target of the hackers. 

The Locked Shields exercises have expanded their realm and have turned into a sort of communications game. The teams have started to respond for certain interviews to update the people about how their response to a certain attack went. It has become a kind of game in which participants have to deal with a pack of threats and neutralize them in a short amount of time. Each team has a different set of threats and it depends on its decisions on how well it will protect the state of Berylia. 

The teams are assigned different colors and different PCs. Red denotes the attackers while green denotes the infrastructure team that has the responsibility to keep the game in the running mode. White is the color given to the team responsible for the communications as well as legal teams and others that are running inside the scenarios. 

There is a bunch of people who are encouraged to act as naïve people who unsuspectingly click on suspicious links and welcome all kinds of viruses into their system that allows the attackers to initiate a lethal cyberattack against the defenders.

The games are designed as such to introduce a new set of viruses and a unique kind of threat each time it starts to give participants a taste of how a real cyberattack happens and what should be their response to it. That’s how they are able to develop a unique strategy each time to deal with the threat. The environment is just so real that everyone is greatly involved in what is happening. This makes these games efficient when it comes to create a defense shield against a cyberattack.

This kind of exercises will enable countries to respond to a cyberattack in real-time and also to neutralize an attack right at the source or at least right after it has been triggered. The main objective is to minimize the amount of time that was earlier spent on detecting the nature of the threat and then creating a response to deal with it. (Ranger, 2017)