Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
TODAY 1
Michael Shelburne
Cyber Warfare: Tomorrows Wars Today
Sullivan College of Technology and Design
On November 24th of 2014 1 Sony Pictures was hacked by a hacking group based out of
North Korea in response to the release of the movie The Interview featuring James Franco and
Seth Rogan in a fictional plot to kill North Korean dictator Kim Jung-Un. During this attack,
over 40 Terabytes (close to the size of 13,640,000 digital 3-4 minutes songs) of information was
stolen containing company secrets and personal employee information (Mitchell, 2014). This
attack against an American company has raised a lot of questions and concerns in the media and
government on how to prevent and respond to such acts against American companies both in the
public and private sectors. This type of politically motivated attack on information and
information systems is known as Cyber Warfare (Rouse, 2010). This attack was aimed at
stopping the distribution and showing of The Interview. With cyber-attacks on the rise in
todays world of technology, governments are moving to define legislations to both prevent and
respond to attacks on their nations infrastructures whether it be in the public or private sectors.
This paper aims to explain the implications of cyber warfare in the world today and how
different governments are involved. As part of my own research, I conducted a survey on social
media to acquire responses from the public to various topics on the current state of cyber security
affairs. The aim of this survey was to see how the public views the pressing concerns in cyber
security affairs today.
1 Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. (SPE) is the American entertainment subsidiary of Japanese
His proposed plans involve: Modernizing Law Enforcement Authorities to Combat Cyber
Crime, National Data Breach Reporting, and Enabling Cybersecurity Information Sharing (The
Whitehouse, 2015). This push to better define cyber laws in the U.S. sets a great example for
countries around the world to do the same. As cyber-attacks become more commonplace in the
world, legislation will need to be created in every form of government in the world if they are
going to survive among each other. With the ease of sending commands remotely to a computer
across the world to damage, destroy, and steal data; cyber-warfare and cybercrime will be a
standard tactic in war time.
With the information gathered and shown in this paper, it is safe to assume that cyber
warfare, security, and legislation are constantly evolving. Each one changing the other as
technology changes and grows. As they change, the businesses and governments of the world
will need to change and evolve as well to defend themselves and function properly. The
battlefield of guns and bombs we know today may soon change to a battlefield we see on a
screen filled with a different assortment of weapons that are stored in computer files.
With cyber security and cyber warfare being such a huge topic in todays media, I set out
to find how educated and opinionated the public was in regards to these topics. Though means of
social media, I distributed a 10 question survey involving relevant topics in cyber legislation,
attacks, and data compromises. During the course of the survey I received 24 responses and what
I found was surprising.
At the beginning of this paper I discussed the recent attack on Sony Pictures. With that
being such a huge topic of discussion in the media I thought it only right to ask a couple
questions in the survey in regards to the matter. My question, Are you familiar with the recent
attack on Sony Pictures involving the movie The Interview? was aimed at providing detail on
how many people actually stay up to date with political news.
Out of the 24 responses, 75%/18 responded yes at being aware of the matter which is a fairly
good percentage of people being knowledgeable at current affairs, especially in cyber affairs. My
second question on the topic asked, Based off your answer to the previous question, do you
believe that Sony Pictures and the U.S. government handled the situation accordingly?.
This question requires the responder to have a little bit more knowledge on the situation. During
the aftermath of the attack on Sony, President Obama placed economic sanctions on North Korea
in hopes of sending a message to North Korea and to set an example for the rest of the world.
This question was aimed at seeing the opinions of policies and retaliation that these types of
attacks have on the government. The responses being at 39% saying yes they agree and 13%
saying they do not agree. Surprisingly 47% said they had no opinion on the matter. This type of
response worries me as it indicates that people dont really care about these types of issues. This
type of attack will become more and more common in the years to come and will effect more and
more people.
During another section of this paper, I discussed the computer worm called Stuxnet
which attacked an Iranian Nuclear facility and disabled and destroyed the machines located there.
As I discussed, this type of attack is known as cyber warfare. This act of warfare will become more
popular in the years to come as technology advances and more countries develop cyber specialists
that work as soldiers to attack other countries. I decided to ask a few questions in regards to cyber
As you can see from the graph, every response indicated that they feel companies should
be working towards a more secure network. If any indication of the all of the recent attacks on
ecommerce companies, securing their networks more would not be a bad idea and their
As shown, 47% of participants agreed that yes this type of information should be shared
with the government when it occurs. The remaining half of the participants chose no as well as
miscellaneous answer, Big brother knows all. Which is a nod towards the United States
National Security Agency (NSA) and theyre controversial means of information gathering. This
type of policy can be seen as both good and bad. On one hand, when attacks such the Sony attack
occur, the cyber security analysts are not alone in the endeavor of analyzing data, finding where
the attack originated from, etc. as they will have a separate resource from the government to
work with on the issue as well. On the more controversial side of things, this data sharing may
include personal information from customers or employees that has not been authorized by those
parties to be shared with another entity other than the one they have already approved. This