World war 3 is already happening.
So it's the latest instalment from our top guest writer Leo Thorncroft. Hopefully his articles are good enough not to warrant my little introductions. Maybe next time.
Me again. Continuing my ramblings about nothing in particular, I figured I'd look at the battleground of the future- the internet, computers, and the cyber war itself.
But, the fact is, it isn't really the future anymore. It's sort of... Well, now. To put this in some context, let's take a look at who's been hacked. There's Evernote (which is really inconvenient, seeing as that's what I use to write these. Had to reset a password and everything), who, admittedly, aren't the biggest company out there, but a hack's a hack. Just thank God it wasn't anything larger.
"Facebook said on Friday that it been the target of a series of attacks by an unidentified hacker group, but it had found no evidence that user data was compromised."
- Reuters.com
Oh. Oops. Well, okay, that's kind of worrying, but it's okay, no user data was compromised, that's cool, right? Phew, that was close, what if they'd got our names and email addresses. They're never going to get those. Especially not from Twitter.
Oh wait!
'Anonymous hackers may have been able to gain access to around 250,000 accounts on the social networking site, including usernames, email addresses and passwords.'
- The Guardian.co.uk
Okay. Bugger. But, hey, I mean, this is bad, but at least they're not attacking a company so big that at one point it had more money than the whole country of America... Are they?
Spoiler. They are.
'Apple has said its computers were attacked by the same hackers who targeted Facebook.'
- bbc.co.uk
Now, I could play this game all day. I've skipped out the fact that Microsoft, as well as some leading American newspapers were all hacked. But this isn't necessarily cyber war, it's just some hacking on a website.
Oh, wait! (last one I promise).
Some of these have already been hacked by activist group Anonymous (who I am going to talk about some other time because they're just plain awesome), but this is a very quick and very precise attack. Not really good enough, though. The US managed to trace it back (the Facebook and Apple one, at least), and where did it lead?
China. It's not just some rather angry individuals deciding to hack for a laugh, it's a military unit of another damn country. Specifically, Unit 61398 (not the catchiest name, I admit). Mandiant, a cyber security firm, were the force behind this trace back to the lovely folks at the PLA, and found that this wasn't even just a couple of isolated incidents, maybe 20 organisations, maximum. Nope, instead, the report said that they'd stolen hundreds of terabytes of data from at least 141 organisations. That's a lot. And this is a reminder that cyber war is happening right now, entire countries fighting through computers. We put so much information into machines we're basically offering it all to anyone, which is a rather terrifying thought. But it is possible that entire wars could be fought with nobody dying. Countries don't need to be ruined by soldiers anymore, not when you can bring an economy to a halt just by pressing a few buttons. So, not directly, at least, nobody's dying. Is this the future of every war, do coders become soldiers? I personally don't think so. Nothing ruins a country quite the same as several million men taking bullets, but this shows that there is a whole other side to combat now, and that there are more subtle ways of fighting. China and America are not at war, but they're subtly getting one up on each other. Whether this could turn in to full scale attacks on each other (cyber or real), who knows. Probably not, but the game's changed now, and in my opinion, I think there are a lot more attacks to come.
