Influencers
Addressing The Third Generation of Cyber Conflict Dmitri Alperovitch
Addressing The Third Generation of Cyber Conflict
Today we are in the third generation of cyber conflict .
The first phase kicked off shortly after the dawn of the Internet ( then called ARPANET ) in the mid 1980s and continued through late 1990s . The primary actors were the old Cold War superpowers , sometimes assisted by their respective NATO and Warsaw Pact allies , who targeted each other ‟ s military and government networks for the purpose of traditional state-on-state espionage . The newly created cyber domain allowed them to augment decades-old signal intelligence ( SIGINT ) collection platforms consisting of passive interception of phone or radio communications with more active hacking operations that allowed collection of documents and data residing on sensitive systems that was never even transmitted over electromagnetic spectrum . This new capability brought on the „ Golden Age of SIGINT ” as described by former NSA Director General Michael Hayden .
The second phase emerged in the late the 1990s and continued through the 2000s and witnessed an explosion of threat actors . They consisted of criminals that were now launching widespread operations against consumers and businesses with the goal of committing financiallymotivated crimes . Similarly , other nation-states including China , North Korea , and Iran , began development of their own offensive cyber operations . These included both traditional espionage against government networks of their rivals and economic espionage for the benefit of their own „ private ‟ sectors through targeting of Western companies for the purpose of stealing intellectual property and trade secrets .
Today we are fully in the midst of the third generation of cyber conflict – whereby revisionist and rogue powers have evolved their cyber doctrines beyond simple theft of data to incorporate the full-range of coercive , disruptive , and destructive offensive operations against public and private critical infrastructure , as well as , influence operations to target the social fabric of Western societies .
In 2017 , the US and British governments publicly attributed the destructive WannaCry malware that temporarily caused outages in US and European corporate and government networks to North Korea , which ironically used stolen and publicly released NSA cyber weapons to increase the disruptive power of this attack . The Russians have launched wave upon wave of destructive cyberattacks against Ukrainian critical infrastructure since the start of their conflict over Crimea and Eastern Ukraine in 2014 , including a cyber takedown of the electric grid for several hours in Western Ukraine in 2015 . Famously , US and Israel have been publicly
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