Threat of Cyberwar Is Over-Hyped 123
nk497 writes "A new OECD report suggests the cyberwar threat is over-hyped. A pair of British researchers have said states are only likely to use cyberattacks against other states when already involved in military action against them, and that sub-state actors such as terrorists and individual hackers can't really do much damage. Dr. Ian Brown said, 'We think that describing things like online fraud and hacktivism as cyberwar is very misleading.'"
Well... (Score:4, Interesting)
Good thing the US isn't at involved in any military action with anyone.
Oh wait. is that WoT thing still going?
Only likely when already involved ? HA! (Score:4, Interesting)
Ho, that's rich! There is speculation that the U.S. and Israel are behind Stuxnet which is dedicated to screwing up Iran. And why not? Why wait until military action? In fact in this case if you can screw the Iran infrastructure up enough, you may not even need to have a military action against them.
Also a lot of this depends on your definition of cyberwar.
China is doing the smart thing right now by backing cyber attacks against the US infrastructure. Before engaging an opponent, it's good to know their weaknesses. The US government uses a lot of Microsoft products as does China now. (China bought shared source years ago). If I were the Chinese I would be setting up servers and hacking them down just to record things like recovery time, etc.
This ain't your daddy's cyberwar. It's all about probing and sizing up an opponent these days.