Understanding of cyber is still vague. The term “cyber war” is used very loosely for a wide range of behaviors, ranging from simple probes, website defacement, and denial of service to espionage and destruction.
Professor Joseph Nye, Member of Boston Global Forum’s Board of Thinkers and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, pointed out four major categories of cyber threats to national security in the recent article on Project Syndicate. They are: cyber war and economic espionage, which are largely associated with states, and cyber crime and cyber terrorism, which are mostly associated with non-state actors. Some early international cooperation to secure cyberspace have been done, mostly to prevent criminals and terrorists. However, the international norms tend to develop slowly.
Read the full article here or visit the Project Subdicate website for more detail.
International Norms in Cyberspace
CAMBRIDGE – Last month, the Netherlands hosted the Global Conference on Cyberspace 2015, which brought together nearly 2,000 government officials, academics, industry representatives, and others. I chaired a panel on cyber peace and security that included a Microsoft vice president and two foreign ministers. This “multi-stakeholder” conference was the latest in a series of efforts to establish rules of the road to avoid cyber conflict.
The capacity to use the Internet to inflict damage is now well established. Many observers believe the American and Israeli governments were behind an earlier attack that destroyed centrifuges at an Iranian nuclear facility. Some say an Iranian government attack destroyed thousands of Saudi Aramco computers. Russia is blamed for denial-of-service attacks on Estonia and Georgia. And just last December, US President Barack Obama attributed an attack on Sony Pictures to the North Korean government.
Until recently, cyber security was largely the domain of a small community of computer experts. When the Internet was created in the 1970s, its members formed a virtual village; everyone knew one another, and together they designed an open system, paying little attention to security.
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