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Cyber-Warfare - The New Face of Warfare and Terrorism.

Cyber-Warfare and Cyber-Terrorism

A brief History of Internet Abuses

The initial use of the internet was meant for information and knowledge sharing between the government and universities that participated in co-op research. Then came the first few who new how to access these interconnected networks and wanted to find out more information, or to see what they could do there. There were people who wrote tools and utilities to test the limits to see how far they could get without getting caught. The terms of Cyber-Warfare, Cyber-Terrorism and Cyber-Espionage are defined as:

Cyber-Warfare – This is best defined as the use of and act of conducting attacks upon computers and information based systems and networks to disrupt or cause complete or as complete of loss of communications of your opponents or targets that can result in large financial, data or transmission or intelligence tracking capabilities.

Cyber-Terrorism – This is best defined as: the mixing and converging of Terrorism and Cyberspace to conduct unlawful attacks and intrusion into networks, computers and other information stored therein to try and force changes in people or governments to further political or social changes. It can also be further stated that the attack should result in violence towards people or property enough to cause harm or fear, examples of such would be bodily injury, death, explosions, plane crashes or severe economic hardships or disruption in the financial stability.

Cyber-Espionage – This is the methods that can and will be used to hold corporate and or personal data hostage until ransom’s are offered, demanded and paid, to keep either Corporate Secrets under the company that discovered or developed the technologies in question pay for it, it the highest bidder gets it.

The internet as we know it today, is a massive group of inter-connected routers, switches and servers, that link many dissimilar computers and network types. This in turn allows for universities, business’s and various Government agencies to share information and communicate. When the system was first built it was used for research and development in new technologies. It was here when the Engineer’s and developers

This is where people were starting to exploit the systems, and crash the servers or networks, based on information they had learned from vendors, or by other research of the remote networks. These individuals also started trading the information between each other and forming groups, cliques or clubs, know as hacking clubs. These groups first started out to just learn how things worked, but soon fell victim, to in fighting and then on to conducting destructive actions and test on the internet.

Fig -1 (Internet Growth over the Years)

We then evolved into seeing viruses spread via internet communication, and this group, figured out that by careful exploiting weakness’ in not only the network security but also exploiting the lack of security on the client side, they could produce replicating viruses and worm’s to send information back to them and to also cause network outages. Then viruses and worm writers learned how to build backdoors into these programs and make them more internet aware, thus helping to expose more remote information and access to the remote networks.

This leads us to this point where we are now, lets look back, for a more detailed look, and look into the future, at what may be the new way that CyberWars and Terrorism in waged. We now see almost on a daily basis if not weekly basis where there has been a new worm, Trojan or vulnerability being exploited on the internet, causing software and hardware manufactures to rush to create and release patches. This sometimes fixes the problems and sometimes it can cause more problems or newer bugs to be found, I will explain more about this later on in the documentation. We also are all too quick to wave off alerts as not really needed or not 100% applicable in our instance, case or environment, thus we don’t patch systems that are in fact a critical or core component in our infrastructure thus creating repeaters for those systems or zombies

I feel that we have lost the main and original focus of the reason the internet came into focus, and now we are paying the price for once again corrupting a system and tool that was meant to help people communicate and share knowledge and information to make better tools, help schools in teaching and to allow us to travel places without having to leave our houses. We now have to worry about having our identities stolen, credit cards fraud, the online version of telemarketers called Spammers, plus a whole plethora of other issues and problems with more coming into light daily. The following quote is the best way to describe how I see things going from here:

"There's a war out there old friend, a world war, and it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information: about how we think, how we see and hear, how we work. It's all about information".

"Sneakers", MCA Universal Pictures, 1992