Militaries are the sword arm of the state, entrusted with defending the state against all threats that would harm its interests. These threats are increasingly emanating from cyberspace and militaries around the world are being called upon formally to undertake responsibility for defending against threats from this domain in addition to the existing physical domains of land, sea, air and space. The unique nature of this domain has required some restructuring on the part of the military.
The Russia–Ukraine conflict, as well as Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, draw light on the geopolitics of data routing and the usage of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) as a tool of control.
Cyberconflict in Ukraine has become normalised in that it is focused, there is no lasting damage, and it effectively conveys a sense of helplessness to the affected government and population. At the same time, it signals to other governments that they are not impervious to such attacks.
US has undertaken a number of initiatives on cybersecurity, specifically ransomware, one of them being the Counter-Ransomware Initiative Meeting held in October 2021. Whether this attempt by the US to mobilise a larger group of countries to discuss ransomware will lead to real outcomes, or is just meant to endorse its actions, remains to be seen.
Cyber-related risks to the energy sector can be minimised by strategic intelligence gathering on potential threat actors, weaving of cyber security strategies into corporate decisions, industry-wide collaboration as well as up-to-date backup systems.
The ever-growing dependence of man on cybernetworks has unbridled a modish genre of cyberthreat called cyberterrorism. The pervasive cyberspace has provided an advantageous operational frontier to the terrorists for executing cyberattacks on critical infrastructures, spreading hate propaganda over the Internet and using it for recruitment, planning and effecting terror attacks.
The article makes an attempt to bring to the fore the various factors which are considered in the due process of attribution of a cyber-attack and the correlation of credible attribution with cyber deterrence. The focal point of the article is a three-step approach to model the decision-making process behind attribution of cyber-attacks using Bayesian Belief Networks and a case study to elucidate on the functioning of the model.
