We have entered a new age. This is the first example of Information Warfare being waged at the national level. An entire nation was shut down (okay, it was a small nation, but still) by a team of politically-minded hackers from somewhere inside Russia. There were no ground troop movements in this war. There was no air bombardment. There was only a… dare I say it? A cyberterrorism incident. Regardless of whether it was state-sponsored or not, this is a turning page.

I heard of this first from my Estonian friend A.T. about twelve hours before it hit ABC and BBC. She said I was getting the news three weeks late. In case you don’t want to read ABC’s decent synopsis, here’s a transcript of her super-brief rundown:

A.T.: Soviets cleared the German control here and substituted it for their own
A.T.: We just see it as another invasion
A.T.: Russians consider themselves to have freed us….So it’s a conflict of understandings
A.T.: And our new government promised to remove the statue
A.T.: So one day they put a yard around it, dug the thing up and took it to a memorial…thing…slightly less idiotic than the middle of the city
WMX: Good deal, except the politically active young Russian asshats got all up in arms about it?
A.T.: Yup
A.T.: Millions in damage
A.T.: Russians feel insulted
A.T.: So now we’ve suddenly pissed off 25% of the country. The rest of the 75% are bloody pleased.

There ya go, from the horse’s mouth. Whatever it was, at least it was an isolated incident (isolated being several weeks and an entire country). We (we being cadets, mostly) mock the addition of “cyberspace” to the Air Force’s mission statement, and Navy’s “cyberwarriors” are the brunt of quite a few snickers, but it looks like they might actually be needed, and not too far in the future. I have my doubts about whether a federally controlled, militaristic bureaucracy can handle a horde of fast-thinking foreign blackhats, but we should be ready. Maybe if they’re equipped like a Special Forces team. “These things we do… that others may play Solitaire.”

I’d like to leave you with a quote from a decently prescient movie:

Trackposted at Diary of the Mad Pigeon.

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