The Darkest Side of War
< Cyberwarfare >
When the calendar pages showed 2007, the world had witnessed a dark beginning with a previously unknown event that took place in Estonia. Now, the door of a new process, beyond which was getting darker day by day, was opened.
The first systematic cyber-attack against Estonia took place during the discussions about relocating the “Bronze Soldier of Tallinn” monument erected by the Soviet army to commemorate World War II. Internet access in NATO member Estonia was disrupted and many online transactions could not be performed.
Cyber warfare was a method used by countries to gather intelligence in the early days, but later the power of cyber warfare was discovered and it was understood that it was more than just gathering information. When cyber attacks are between states, it is defined as “Cyber War”. Cyber attacks in many areas such as interstate espionage, theft of confidential documents, and spying have increased in recent years and have caused great material and moral problems for states.
Cyber attack attacks between the United States, China, the Russian Federation, Iran, India, North Korea and South Korea are the most striking examples in this field. In particular, we see that these countries are increasingly competing with each other in the cyber attack environment and have to allocate budgets of millions of dollars. Cyber wars, the only difference from the war we know, is that they take place on digital systems, and they can lead to deadly cases in terms of their results.
Cyber warfare is still an evolving concept, but many experts worry that it will become a key component of possible future conflicts. It launches from any distance, stealthily and unobtrusively, unlike standard military attacks that use conventional warfare tools such as guns and missiles. It is often very difficult to respond to such an attack if you are caught off guard and unprepared. In this type of attack, which knows no boundaries ethically, all kinds of sectors, from health care to food distribution, that communicate over computer networks are the vulnerable interlocutors of cyber attacks.
We may be exposed to different types of cyber attacks due to problems such as weaknesses in internet communication design, lack of management, open and unencrypted systems that make the internet work, the ability to distribute malicious software, errors in hardware and software, and online access to critical systems. When we look at the world in general, we see that encryption viruses, DDOS attacks, cyber espionage and hacktivism attacks come to the fore.
Whether an attack is considered an act of cyber warfare depends on a number of factors. Chief among these is the identity of the attacker, what he did, and how much damage his actions caused. Attacks by individual hackers are generally not considered cyber warfare unless they are managed and supported by a government. In other words, cyber warfare, like other forms of warfare, is generally defined as a conflict between states, not individual.
Many countries are now making efforts and investments to develop their military cyber power, both to defend against other countries and to attack when necessary. The feature that perhaps best defines the importance of cyber warfare is that it is a digital attack so serious that it can be seen as the equivalent of a physical attack. In general, cyber attackers can cause damage such as:
1. They can break through the firewall of the target system and infiltrate the system and steal top secret data.
2. They can encrypt data such as sensitive information and personnel and health records stored on IT assets, making them unusable and demanding ransom.
3. By opening microphones or cameras with remote access, they can record and use the information they have obtained by listening to the environment, as well as serving them on the internet, or using them for blackmail.
4. They can steal data by infiltrating existing computing networks and sell this information to hostile state intelligence agencies / rival firms.
5. By making your systems unusable, they can disrupt and disrupt the operability of the targeted institutions.
6. With out-of-service attacks, they can damage the corporate reputation as well as cause great material damage.
7. They can infect data by sending malicious codes via SPAM e-mails.
8. They can empty bank accounts by stealing sensitive information such as credit cards and passwords by secretly tracking online activity.
9. They can use corporate computers to attack other institutions or governments.
10. They can use the CPU and RAM power of their corporate computers to mine Bitcoin and similar digital currencies.
It seems that cyber warfare is too big to be taken lightly, at least as serious, dangerous and deadly as a conventional military attack. If countries cannot prevent these attacks from bad aggressors, they may face very bad situations. Although it is not visible to the public at the moment, there is a serious cyber war going on around the world, especially in the commercial field. There is no guarantee that this war will not evolve to a much more dangerous level in the future.
The more well-trained personnel you have in the field of cyber security, the stronger you are in this war. There is no escape from this in an environment where technology develops so rapidly and mutual interests constantly clash. However, whatever the circumstances, Sun-Tzu’s famous “Winning without fighting is the greatest success” doctrine should be our core philosophy.
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