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Illustration by Francesco Bongiorni for FP Yet those ailments, unlike past examples of cyber “war,” actually do kill people. Separating war from physical violence makes it a metaphorical notion it would mean that there is no way to distinguish between World War II, say, and the “wars” on obesity and cancer. And if an act is not at least potentially violent, it’s not an act of war. No cyberoffense has ever injured a person or damaged a building.

Indeed, there is no known cyberattack that has caused the loss of human life. The same is true for the vast majority of cyberattacks on record. The attack was not violent, it wasn’t purposefully aimed at changing Estonia’s behavior, and no political entity took credit for it. It was certainly a nuisance and an emotional strike on the country, but the bank’s actual network was not even penetrated it went down for 90 minutes one day and two hours the next. “ What’s the difference between a blockade of harbors or airports of sovereign states and the blockade of government institutions and newspaper websites?” asked Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip.ĭespite his analogies, the attack was no act of war. The attacks reached a peak on May 9, when 58 Estonian websites were attacked at once and the online services of Estonia’s largest bank were taken down. The well-wired country found itself at the receiving end of a massive distributed denial-of-service attack that emanated from up to 85,000 hijacked computers and lasted three weeks. Take the attacks on Estonia in April 2007, which came in response to the controversial relocation of a Soviet war memorial, the Bronze Soldier. Most other commonly cited cases of cyberwar are even less remarkable. The available evidence on the Siberian pipeline blast is so thin that it shouldn’t be counted as a proven case of a successful cyberattack. Even after the CIA declassified a redacted version of Reed’s source, a note on the so-called Farewell Dossier that describes the effort to provide the Soviet Union with defective technology, the agency did not confirm that such an explosion occurred. Something likely did happen, but Reed’s book is the only public mention of the incident and his account relied on a single document. There are also no media reports from 1982 that confirm such an explosion, though accidents and pipeline explosions in the Soviet Union were regularly reported in the early 1980s. National Security Council aide at the time who revealed the incident in his 2004 book, At the Abyss the only harm came to the Soviet economy.īut did it really happen? After Reed’s account came out, Vasily Pchelintsev, a former KGB head of the Tyumen region, where the alleged explosion supposedly took place, denied the story. No one died, according to Thomas Reed, a U.S.

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Targeting a Soviet pipeline linking gas fields in Siberia to European markets, the operation sabotaged the pipeline’s control systems with software from a Canadian firm that the CIA had doctored with malicious code. Air Force estimated the explosion at 3 kilotons, equivalent to a small nuclear device. The account goes like this: In June 1982, a Siberian pipeline that the CIA had virtually booby-trapped with a so-called “logic bomb” exploded in a monumental fireball that could be seen from space. Take the dubious story of a Soviet pipeline explosion back in 1982, much cited by cyberwar’s true believers as the most destructive cyberattack ever. The cyberattacks we’ve seen so far, from Estonia to the Stuxnet virus, simply don’t meet these criteria. Consider the definition of an act of war: It has to be potentially violent, it has to be purposeful, and it has to be political. Time for a reality check: Cyberwar is still more hype than hazard.

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armed forces for “conducting a combined arms campaign across all domains - land, air, maritime, space, and cyberspace.” Meanwhile, growing piles of books and articles explore the threats of cyberwarfare, cyberterrorism, and how to survive them. Lynn III, the deputy defense secretary at the time, was writing that cyberwar is “just as critical to military operations as land, sea, air, and space.” In January, the Defense Department vowed to equip the U.S. Cyberspace is “a domain in which the Air Force flies and fights,” Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne claimed in 2006. military establishment, which is busy competing over who should get what share of the fight. Since then, it seems to have arrived - at least by the account of the U.S. “Cyberwar is coming!” John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt predicted in a celebrated Rand paper back in 1993.