Numerous movies and novels have been made depicting the damage a cyber war can do to governments and common people. Cyber War or electronic warfare will be fought by geeks funded by governments or just guys who are tired of their jobs and require excitement in their lives. Suspecting a virtual war like the ones depicted in movies does begin, how much damage can it cause?
According to a report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a war of this sort is not possible and is never going to take place. This report on cyber security was researched and presented by two UK based professors which ruled out a large scale war involving governments having the general characteristics of a general war. Although instances of cyber espionage and attacks for money will be conducted by a group of people quite commonly.
The report mentioned that most of the important computer systems are protected against all the known exploits which will make it harder to identify new exploits and potholes that will help in infecting computers. The large scale effects of cyber attacks are not known since nothing such as this has taken place and they are difficult to predict. The report assures that they will have smaller consequences than other predicted attacks, but at the same time they will have a large. This large reach is because of the interconnected nature of todays connected systems. There is another alarming report from the report about cyber criminals using numerous weaponry to infiltrate systems. The authors also mention that attacks will become ubiquitous in a few years and weapons like viruses, Trojans, malwares, denial of service attacks and others will become fairly common. One important mention to cite this point was the recent attack on Iran’s nuclear installations by the Stuxnet virus which almost crippled the nuclear enrichment program.