Cyber war

Major countries and nation-states are engaged in a "Cyber Cold War," amassing "cyber weapons," conducting espionage, and testing networks in preparation for using the Internet to conduct war, according to a new report to be released on Tuesday by McAfee.

In particular, countries gearing up for cyber offensives are the U.S., Israel, Russia, China, and France, the says the report, compiled by former White House Homeland Security adviser Paul Kurtz and based on interviews with more than 20 experts in international relations, national security and Internet security.

"We don't believe we've seen cases of cyber warfare," said Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research at McAfee. "Nations have been reluctant to use those capabilities because of the likelihood that [a big cyber attack] could do harm to their own country. The world is so interconnected these days."

Threats of cyber warfare have been hyped for decades. There have been unauthorized penetrations into government systems since the early ARPANET days and it has long been known that the

However, experts are putting dots together and seeing patterns that indicate that there is increasing intelligence gathering and building of sophisticated cyber attack capabilities, according to the report titled Virtually Here: The Age of Cyber Warfare.

"While we have not yet seen a 'hot' cyber war between major powers, the efforts of nation-states to build increasingly sophisticated cyber attack capabilities, and in some cases demonstrate a willingness to use them, suggest that a 'Cyber Cold War' may have already begun," the report says.

Because pinpointing the source of cyber attacks is usually difficult if not impossible, the motivations can only be speculated upon, making the whole cyber war debate an intellectual exercise at this point. But the report offers some theories.

For instance, Alperovitch speculates that the July 4 attacks denial-of-service on Web sites in the U.S. and South Korea could have been a test by an foreign entity to see if flooding South Korean networks and the transcontinental communications between the U.S. and South Korea would disrupt the ability of the U.S. military in South Korea to communicate with military leaders in Washington, D.C., and the Pacific Command in Hawaii.

"The ability of the North Koreans to disable cyber communications between the U.S. and South Korea would give them a huge strategic advantage" if they were to attack South Korea, he said.

There have been earlier attacks that smack of cyber warfare too. Estonian government and commercial sites suffered debilitating denial-of-service attacks in 2007, and last year sites in Georgia were attacked during the South Ossetia war, orchestrated by civilian attackers, the report says.

The report concludes that if we aren't seeing it already, cyber warfare will be a reality soon enough.

"Over the next 20 to 30 years, cyber attacks will increasingly become a component of war," William Crowell, a former NSA deputy director, is quoted as saying. "What I can't foresee is whether networks will be so pervasive and unprotected that cyber war operations will stand alone."

Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service, and the Associated Press.

There have been earlier attacks that smack of cyber warfare too. Estonian government and commercial sites suffered debilitating denial-of-service attacks.

You'll find a number of suspicious incidents have occurred this year in Australia, starting a very short time after a merger between Rio Tinto and Chinalco was knocked back by Rio. In another completely unrelated incident after this knockback a Rio employee was imprisoned in China for "attempting to bribe officals".

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the long term strategy is for America to incite cyber war with the East. They want to use Cyber war and cyber terrorism to hold countries to economic ransom if countries do not comply with political and military objectives.

America will use the threat of shutting off critical infrastructure of countries if political leaders don't agree to deals that America want to make with others.

This (cyber war / cyber terrorism) is a far more clean cut and covert 'serious consequences' punishment than sending in the B-52's or sending in CIA human assets on the ground to carry out over throw ops against a government not complying with trade and industry deals between governments in the east and west.

This what you see on media outlets is a secret war build up that is due to be played out as soon as U.S intelligence are happy Obama has done enough to secure cyber.

U.S can't carry out the ops it wants to carry out in the cyber domain until its country has met a certain standard of cybersecurity which it is currently not met.

The U.S can only carry out pocket attacks right now on small countries such as Estonia, Georgia etc because U.S isn't fully secure yet to defend a counter attack that would be expected against a cyber offensive carried out by U.S.

The strategy is to make all attacks appear to be coming from Russia or other enemy state of the U.S., the U.S are ininfiltrating computers of those states, as well as covert ops by CIA to physically plant malcode within major defence companies and technology makers.

The U.S are too scared to carry out a major cyber offensive right now cause their cyber infrastructure security is poor, as soon as it isn't U.S plan cyber attacks on major countries.

Because of the poor U.S cyber defense capability right now, U.S on