PerspectiveCyberattacks are rewriting the "rules" of modern warfare – and we aren’t prepared for the consequences

Published 16 May 2019

Governments are becoming ever more reliant on digital technology, making them more vulnerable to cyber attacks. Politically-motivated cyber attacks are becoming increasingly commonplace but unlike traditional warfare between two or more states, cyberwarfare can be launched by groups of individuals. On occasion, the state is actually caught in the crosshairs of competing hacking groups. Vasileios Karagiannopoulos and Mark Leiser write in the Conversation that this doesn’t mean that states don’t actively prepare for such attacks. In most cases, cyberwarfare operations have been conducted in the background, designed as scare tactics or displays of power. But the blending of traditional warfare and cyberwarfare seems inevitable and a recent incident added a new dimension.