Massive cyber invasions can inflict no less damage to the enemy than an exchange of missile strikes.
After the defeat of Nazi Germany, the so-called Big World was established in the world. Wars, of course, happen regularly, but they are local in nature. And the superpowers, thanks to nuclear parity, are wary of directly sorting out relations with each other. Who wants to get hit on the brains with a nuclear club in return? This, of course, has the most deplorable effect on the career of a general. In peacetime, you can also make a rapid ascent in the service. But the scope is still not the same.
However, experts believe that the threat of a global war has not disappeared. Moreover, she is closer than ever. However, we will not see any massive invasion of the occupied territories by soldiers, or nuclear explosions. The third world war will be waged by squads of hackers! At the same time, according to Jeremy Straub, professor of computer science at the University of North Dakota (USA), cyberattacks can cause damage comparable to the use of nuclear weapons.
“The only difference is that when an atomic bomb explodes, all people within a radius of 400 meters evaporate instantly,” says Professor Straub. “And in a cyberattack, the same number of people will die over a longer period of time from cold, hunger, useless water and traffic accidents.
Rehearsals for such hacker attacks are taking place all over the world. For example, three years ago, a group of cybercriminals associated with Syria hacked into the computers of an American public utility company that was involved in the city's water supply. The hackers changed the concentration of chemicals used by public utilities to purify drinking water at least twice. According to computer security experts, the hackers lacked knowledge about the construction of the water supply system. Moreover, they had no intention of harming people. But if you have the will and skills, you can poison thousands of people and deprive the population of fresh water.
And in August last year, far less peaceful hackers attacked an oil refinery in Saudi Arabia. The program they launched was supposed to lead to the explosion of the object. The only thing that, by a lucky chance, prevented the catastrophe, was an error in the computer code of the cybercriminals.
But, of course, the most tasty morsel for cyber terrorists is the energy systems of states. Based on open data published in the media, Jeremy Straub argues that Russian and American government hackers are competing with each other to install their malware deeper and more discreetly into the control systems of industrial and energy enterprises of the enemy state. These "Trojans" function in a standby mode and wait for a command to bring down the infrastructure.
“I don’t want to belittle the devastating consequences of a nuclear attack,” says Professor Straub. - But in this area there are at least some systems of mutual control of nuclear arsenals. And the principle of "guaranteed mutual destruction" makes a missile attack pointless. And in the case of cyberwar, there are no such mutual restrictions. In addition, a hacker attack is much easier to disguise than to hide which country launched the missile.
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It is worth adding one more circumstance that makes a hacker attack tempting: a petty dirty trick, such as the collapse of an electronic payment system, can paralyze the economy and cause great harm to the country. But still, this is not enough for the escalation of the conflict to reach the scale of a nuclear war.
In the meantime, monstrous holes are gaping in the computer security systems of key infrastructure facilities. Jeremy Straub cites the following figures: only 20 percent of American companies that use computers to control industrial machines are trying to protect their networks from hacker attacks. Analysis of the identified hacks shows that in 40 percent of cases, crooks had access to a computer system for a year or more. That is, they could potentially do whatever they wanted with impunity.
At the moment it is impossible to solve the problem of digital security. Even in the United States, a country that claims to be a technology leader, 25% of cybersecurity jobs are vacant. There is simply no such number of qualified specialists in nature.
YAROSLAV KOROBATOV