Conclusion
Although cyber warfare is currently limited to information networks and network-attached systems, it will drastically expand in the near future. Rather than decide between kinetic and non-kinetic effects, threat actors and cyber warriors will choose the effect that will best produce the desired outcome. Cyber-based effects will not be limited only to networks of computers and infrastructure; rather, they will encompass all electronic information processing systems across land, air, sea, space, and cyberspace domains. The future of cyber warfare is, unfortunately for the defender, not hindered or predicated by policy, technology, and threat. The leaks of major nation state-level exploits like BlueKeep and its variants, as well as the proliferation of force multipliers such as social media influence and bot tactics, will expedite and increase the variety and ferocity of future cyber-attacks.
New technology will have disproportionate effects, not only on the weapons used in cyberspace but also on the makeup of the domain itself. National policy on cyberspace dictates the objectives and rules of engagement for cyber capabilities as well as the organization and execution of operations, but those "rules" apply only to the nations and fighters that are willing to subscribe to them. There is no Geneva convention for cyberspace, and the establishment of those limits on defenders in truth only empowers those who don't play by the rules. Cyberspace is the only domain on the planet where a nation state such as North Korea or Iran can have the same devastating effect of impact as the most powerful nations on Earth. The use of the digital space has effectively leveled the playing field.
The digital world is where nations and organizations will continue to fight for the future. To own that "ground" and to take the initiative from the enemy is nothing new in the annals of espionage and warfare; it is simply a change in tooling and tactics that is necessitated by the evolution of where warfare will be fought that will continue to drive the New Cold War.
There is a hard truth for those of us caught in the middle of this no man's land between warring cyber superpowers and the hacker organizations of the world: we have built our systems and infrastructures to actually allow these attacks to succeed. Half a century of excessive speed of innovation and a reliance on a failed security paradigm will continue to enable these incursions and exploits to succeed.
In this chapter, we really dove into the history of this space in a very factual analysis of what brought us collectively to this arena. In the following chapter, we will discuss how the networks we have built and the foundational architecture of these infrastructures are flawed and will continue to fail.