Cyber War

Cyber warfare involves the actions by a nation-state or international organization to attack and

attempt to damage another nation's computers or information networks

Raged by terrorist groups, companies, political or ideological extremist groups, hacktivists, and

transnational criminal organizations

Methods: computer viruses or denial-of-service attacks, Espionage, Sabotage, Electrical power

grid

 Virus: a piece of code which is capable of copying itself and typically has a
detrimental effect, such as corrupting the system or destroying data

Denial-of-service (DoS) attack is an attempt to make a machine or network

resource unavailable to its intended users, such as to temporarily or indefinitely
interrupt or suspend services of a host connected to the Internet.

 Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or

resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent
some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled

Criminal perpetrators of DoS often target sites or services hosted on highprofile web servers such as banks, credit card payment gateways. Motives of
revenge, blackmail or activism can be behind other attacks

Espionage
Cyber espionage can provide the information needed to launch a successful attack.

Massive spying by the US on many countries, revealed by Edward Snowden. NSA recorded
nearly every cell phone conversation in the Bahamas without the Bohemian government's
permission and similar programmes in Kenya, the Philippines, Mexico and Afghanistan.

The "Titan Rain" probes of American defence contractors computer systems since
2003.The Office of Personnel Management data breach, in the US, widely attributed to
China

Sabotage
Computers and satellites that coordinate other activities are vulnerable components of a system
and could lead to the disruption of equipment. Power, water, fuel, communications, and
transportation infrastructure all may be vulnerable to disruption.
security breaches - stolen credit card numbers, and that potential targets can also include the
electric power grid, trains, or the stock market.
In mid July 2010, security experts discovered a malicious software program called Stuxnet that
had infiltrated factory computers and had spread to plants around the world. It is considered "the
first attack on critical industrial infrastructure.

Electrical power grid

The federal government of the United States admits that the electric power grid is
susceptible to cyberwar fare. In April 2009, reports surfaced that China and
Russia had infiltrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs
that could be used to disrupt the system.
Massive power outages caused by a cyber attack could disrupt the economy,
distract from a simultaneous military attack, or create a national trauma.

In India
The Department of Information Technology created the Indian Computer Emergency
Response Team (CERT-In) in 2004 to thwart cyber attacks in India. The government created
a

new

subdivision,

the National

Critical

Information

Infrastructure

Protection

Centre (NCIIPC) to thwart attacks against energy, transport, banking, telecom, defence, space
and other sensitive areas.

A high-profile cyber attack on 12 July 2012 breached the email accounts of about 12,000
people, including those of officials from the Ministry of External Affairs, Ministry of Home
Affairs, Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO), and the Indo-Tibetan
Border Police (ITBP)