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The websites of the president of Georgia and the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs were replaced by collaged images of Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili and Adolf Hitler.
From Ukraine to Georgia and Estonia, Russia’s use of cyberattacks is eye-opening. It illustrates how our definitions of combat and warfare are changing as nations exchange blows in the virtual world ahead of or even instead of actual armed conflict.
COLD WAR TO CODE WAR
Throughout history, religious, moral, or chivalric codes have imposed limits on war. And in the past century, the concept of international law was developed to restrict states from attacking others. Societies have sought to create clear distinctions between combatants and noncombatants, between the battlefield and the home front, between a just war and an unjust war.
The weaponization of code is the most significant development in warfare since the development of nuclear weapons, and its rapid rise has created a domain of conflict with no widely accepted norms or rules.
The analogy that most foreign policy hands point to as a possible precedent for containing cyberweapons is nuclear nonproliferation: the creation of arms control agreements, treaties, United Nations resolutions, and international monitoring programs to govern the spread and use of nuclear weapons.
To create a cyberweapon, all one needs are a computer, an Internet connection, and some coding skills. The development of cyberweapons is incredibly difficult to trace. And as Jim Gosler observed, the nonphysical nature of cyberconflict has also made the private sector a combatant. Since national borders have much less meaning online, there’s little to stop hackers from going right for the valuable assets.
