Cyber-warfare is often a wrongly understood topic. When people think about cyber-warfare, they think it’s more like regular pentesting or ethical hacking. Even though it’s on a much larger scale, the effects of cyber-warfare are usually much more significant and could have disruptive effects on society. To better give an understanding. To do that, we will first define the scope of cyber-warfare and the difference between traditional warfare.
The primary difference between traditional warfare and cyber-warfare is the different war domains they operate. Usually, Traditional warfare relies on doctrines like land, sea, and air. However, where cyber-warfare is different in the cyber domain; this domain consists of computers and different networks. In traditional warfare, they rely on destroying physical targets; instead, in cyber-warfare, it’s about destroying computers and networks to achieve the desired effect. To breach or destroy the targeted computer systems or networks, they rely on different vulnerabilities found and exploited to receive a strategic or intelligence advantage.
What are other key objectives and motivations of cyber-warfare?
In intelligence gathering, you want to know what your adversary is up to; having the right intelligence and operational position of enemy troops and positions and weapons could lead to excellent advantage in any modern conflict. Sometimes it’s even possible to disrupt with, for example, a Denial of Service Attack on the services of the opponent, causing downtime or crucial time for your troops to do movements. Same counts for damage and destruction of enemy systems.
While Psychological Operations could be a valuable tool to ensure fear into your opponents, while it certainly could be effective, it’s usually one option that is not as used. Not last but not least potent would be Economic Espionage which could lead to the stealing of vital information to obtain drawings of military equipment and other trade secrets or steal intellectual properties that could be sold on the dark web.