“The hype about everything “cyber” has obscured three basic truths: cyberwar has never happened in the past, it is not occurring in the present, and it is highly unlikely that it will disturb the future. Indeed, rather than heralding a new era of violent conflict, so far the cyber-era has been defined by the opposite trend: a computer-enabled assault on political violence.”

Vishant Patel, of the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, talks about the malicious computer network known as the Citadel Botnet. (Jason Redmond / Courtesy Reuters)

Excerpted from Thomas Rid:

“The hype about everything “cyber” has obscured three basic truths: cyberwar has never happened in the past, it is not occurring in the present, and it is highly unlikely that it will disturb the future. Indeed, rather than heralding a new era of violent conflict, so far the cyber-era has been defined by the opposite trend: a computer-enabled assault on political violence. Cyberattacks diminish rather than accentuate political violence by making it easier for states, groups, and individuals to engage in two kinds of aggression that do not rise to the level of war: sabotage and espionage. Weaponized computer code and computer-based sabotage operations make it possible to carry out highly targeted attacks on an adversary’s technical systems without directly and physically harming human operators and managers. Computer-assisted attacks make it possible to steal data without placing operatives in dangerous environments, thus reducing the level of personal and political risk.

These developments represent important changes in the nature of political violence, but they also highlight limitations inherent in cyberweapons that greatly curtail the utility of cyberattacks. Those limitations seem to make it difficult to use cyberweapons for anything other than one-off, hard-to-repeat sabotage operations of questionable strategic value that might even prove counterproductive. And cyber-espionage often requires improving traditional spycraft techniques and relying even more heavily on human intelligence. Taken together, these factors call into question the very idea that computer-assisted attacks will usher in a profoundly new era.”

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