The NY times published an article about President Obama escalating a project called ‘Olympic Games’, which involved cyber warfare targeted against Iran. The same project included the now infamous ‘stuxnet’ worm. The attack was supposed to destroy the ability of Iran to enrich uranium but the American attack failed as the ability of Iran to enrich Uranium was not significantly affected. ‘The NYT article here
The result of this failed American attack however will give rise to providing justification for attacks on networks, countries, companies and individuals by hacker groups, political organisations, countries all over the world as well as extremists and nutcases at large.
The term Cyber Warfare is actually a misnomer as attacks generally involve virus, spyware and attacks against individual citizens, companies or Government devices and servers and does not happen in ‘Cyber Space’ but in your home, office or factory. Should the USA launch a network attack on South Africa, South Africa could just null route all incoming traffic from the USA but our own devices could attack our own Government, companies or neighbours.
Therefore the term Cyber warfare is misleading as it assumes that war can be achieved in cyber space. This is clearly not the case as the warfare is far more personal and direct and involves deception and deceiving of people or systems. So Cyber Warfare involves virus, spyware and affected devices may also be strung together to launch a network attack, similar to that which social resistance groups like for example Anonymous employs, but remedies are again the same as the attacks seen from hacker groups.
There is really no way for countries to defend themselves against attacks from the USA Government as almost all proprietary operating systems and almost all anti virus, spyware and such security software is either owned or operated by USA based companies. For countries to defend their systems, their citizen’s systems and devices against attacks from criminals, governments and others the use of hardened open source operating systems is advised. Countries should possibly seek to lessen their dependency on the USA by implementing Open Source software in Government departments. Governments should employ, empower and develop their own citizens.
