DailyPost 739
CYBER SPACE – A THEATRE OF WAR
However much we wish to the contrary, Cyber Space for sure has become the main theatre of war. It all started with the watershed event of Cyber Security, Stuxnet attack on the Iranian Nuclear Facility at Natanz in 2008. It was a deliberate choice between the conventional & the Cyber and US & Israel opted for Cyber weapon. It was the first professional cyber weapon used & it was able to fulfil its military mission. Malware as a weapon and cyber space as a theatre of war thus got established. The clue to the future of war and establishing control was wide in the open.
Nation states got into the act of perfecting this domain with many developing immense cyber offensive capabilities. Cyber War is out in the open in 2018. Today Britain has accused Russian Military Agency, GRU, for directing host of cyber attacks to undermine western democracies, creating confusion in everything from sports to transport, 2016 US Presidential elections included. As per the British assessment, the GRU, is a pernicious cyber aggressor and has been using a network of hackers across the globe.
GRU seems to be certainly behind the Bad Rabbit and World Anti-Doping Agency attacks of 2017. The DNC servers hack of 2016 is attributed to them and so is the case of theft of e-mails from a UK based TV station in 2015. Agents of this Agency have already been indicted in the Russian hacking of US elections GRU’s actions are reckless and indiscriminate, says the British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt. More and more of Russian cyber exploits are hitting the international headlines.
In April this year, four Russians were arrested while they were to launch a major ”close access” cyber attack against the headquarters of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague. The Dutch investigators feel that spies wanted to go to accredited Spiez laboratory in Switzerland, which was in the process of testing Novichok samples from Salisbury. This was a nerve agent attack in which Russia was said to involved early this year in UK.
CYBER OFFENSIVE CAPABILITIES WILL DECIDE THE WINNERS OF TOMORROW.
Sanjay Sahay