The Ukraine war is the first digital conflict
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is perhaps the first major shooting war in which the two sides are fully equipped to trade blows in cyberspace. The conflict highlights how far technology has evolved in such a short time.
In 1997, when I was in middle school, the Internet had yet to conquer the public consciousness. One of my classmates had a reputation as something of a tech whiz. He boasted that he could remotely break into someone else’s computer and make the disk drive pop out all by itself — an impressive feat in those days, long before the term “cyber warfare” entered the lexicon.
Compare what was possible back in 1997 with the capabilities of today. Governments take control of each other’s official websites, hospital systems (as happened at Hadera’s Hillel Yaffe Medical Center), railroad systems (as happened in Iran), and other critical infrastructures. The phones of senior defense figures are hacked routinely. And with today’s smart televisions, smartphones, and even smart refrigerators that alert you when you need to make a run to the convenience store, there is hardly any aspect of our lives that isn’t exposed to surveillance.
These capabilities have been thrown into sharp relief by the war between Russia and Ukraine, the first war in which, alongside the conventional forces fighting on the traditional battlefield, each side has a cyber army that could knock the enemy off balance.
Create a free account to keep reading.
