If you grew up in the ’80s and ’90s watching movies like “War Games,” “Hackers” and “The Matrix,” then you remember pop culture’s infatuation with then-new computer technology and how it might be put to use in a global conflict. We still see echoes of this in more recent movies, like “Live Free or Die Hard” with its cyberterrorist villains, but by and large, film and television have outgrown this subject. We’re seeing fewer rogue artificial intelligence villains and more technology being used as it is in real life: as a means of communication. Cyber-terrorism and cyber-war aren’t quite as glamorous or as exciting as they were once made out to be in the movies, and that’s a good thing.
Cyberterror vs. Intelligence Warfare
According to the FBI, the term “cyberterror” refers to Internet-based attacks made on individuals and private citizens. This is differentiated from “intelligence warfare,” which involves military combatants engaged in the theft or manipulation of information. What we’re dealing with in the case of Korea is largely a matter of cyberterrorism, with privately owned websites, servers and computers being hacked into by unseen forces. If, say, a public webpage was hacked, even by an agent under the employ of a foreign government, that would be an act of cyberterrorism. If the same agent hacked into the CIA database to determine where the U.S. has troops stationed in order to target them for attacks, that would be considered information warfare.
An Issue of Violence
Techandlaw.net purports that cyberterrorism is the premeditated and politically motivated attack against computer systems and programs resulting in violence against non-combatant targets by groups and agents. This definition is quite specific, and it doesn’t seem to acknowledge that much of what we consider cyberterrorism is ultimately nonviolent but intended to cause chaos and compromise stability via attacks on media and financial centers. Truthfully, if you want to know what World War III might look like, we need simply look at the conflict between North Korea and South Korea.
The Korean Cyberwar
In North Korea, it’s estimated that less than one percent of the population has ever been online. In South Korea, there are more Internet connections than there are people. According to CSMonitor.com, a number of South Korean websites were shut down on the 63rd anniversary of the Korean War, and North Korea is on the list of suspects claiming responsibility for the attacks. The attacks didn’t result in violence, merely chaos.
Cyberterrorism has a certain appeal to rogues, hacktivists, criminals and struggling nations because of its accessibility and the fact that it’s unlikely to result in any truly devastating consequences. North Korea cannot compete with the military might of the U.S., and it might not be able to afford a good missile program, but they can recruit a group of techies to hack South Korean and English-language websites.
Meanwhile, Stateside…
If you’re wondering exactly how cyberwar affects you, the reality is that if you’re careful about your own personal cybersecurity, then it really doesn’t. Protection from cybercrimes and identity theft is an everyday need these days, according to the Lifelock AOL page, ​and it’s important to be aware—but beyond taking basic security measures, the average individual has little to fear going into the next decade of computerized conflict.