Understanding Why Cybercrime Is the New Face of War

Cybercrime is the new face of war. Considering the number of cyber attacks and crimes being conducted at a global scale across regions and countries, there is little doubt the fact that hackers have waged a war so massive, it will be difficult to control for generations to come. And here’s what we believe - it will only get worse. From anti-Western hacker groups to Russian hackers spying on Ukraine to the onslaught of privacy breeches and data thefts and attacks on businesses; the new digital world is full of crime and we do not have any trails.

We know for a fact that the alliance between different interest groups worldwide poses greater threats for internet security than ever. This, coupled with the increasing obsessions of governments of some of the leading nations of the world on cyber offense has resulted in a rather retaliated effect- i.e. the creation of very sophisticated malware with the potential capacity to infect almost every system. We are not just talking about personal computers and mainframe databases at company headquarters. We are now speaking of disabled nuclear centrifuges to compromised privacies through iPhones being turned into all-room listening devices. The hackers we are dealing with today are no less knowledgeable than our best defense. They know our vulnerabilities and they know how to exploit them. A more disturbing aspect is that as more and more glitches emerge, one wonders whether the alliances are powerful enough to produce masterminds capable enough to tap into vulnerabilities even unknown by the makers of the software.

This implies that the offenses are more than often decentralized while our defense is mostly centralized and that too powered by a single body – i.e. the government. This free flow of information has created bigger problems. And they are here to stay. Unless we are able to come up with better strategies and stronger alliances in order to counter these offences, the world of cyber crime is going to expand and challenge every possible defense we have created this far.