Could Hacking Cause the Next World War?

I don’t know what weapons will be used in the next world war, but the one after will be fought with sticks and stones.

Nawaf Bitar, a senior vice-president at Juniper Networks Inc. (NASDAQ: JNPR), believes that cyberwar is an even bigger threat than is terrorism, and that a cyberattack that goes unchecked will lead to a real war. Bitar argues that cyberattacks should not be treated any differently from a terror attack using guns and bombs. What, he asks, will happen when a cyberattack starts killing people?

Bitar says it is time to fight back with a “new type of defense”:

A type of active defense that disrupts the economics of hacking and challenges convention. A type of defense that interferes with the hackers. A type of defense that breaks algorithms. A type of defense that disrupts data collection.

And while it did not start a shooting war, the United States and Israel are believed to have let loose the Stuxnet worm to seek intelligence about Iran’s nuclear facilities as far back as 2009. The worm is thought to have stalled Iran’s progress on its nuclear enrichment program by as much as several years.

Such an incident may not start a shooting war, but Bitar suggests that a cyber or hacking attack on the U.S. air traffic control system that results in any loss of life would almost surely lead to a retaliatory attack involving real armaments.

While this scenario might be at one extreme of the possibilities for a confrontation caused by hacking and cyberwarfare, it cannot be dismissed out hand. Governments, including the U.S. government, are already participating either as cops or perps, or even at times as both at once. The ground rules have surely changed for what may start a war, but the result, as Einstein noted long ago, is already well understood.