This simple tweet of mine from the recent Defense Intelligence Agency DoDIIS conference in San Antonio was surprisingly popular on Twitter:
Michael Dell #DODIISWW15: #cybersecurity is “the defining battle for the next 10 years.” @C4ISRNET
Tens of thousands of Twitter impressions for this tweet got me thinking about what it was that struck a cord with people.
Was it name recognition and celebrity? The name Michael Dell certainly caught my attention when I was reviewing the conference program, and I made sure I was in the room when this innovator and magnate (Dell Computer was ranked 51st on the Fortune 500 when he bought back his namesake company for $24 billion in 2013 ) took the stage.
Or did it reflect what many people thought should truly be No. 1 on a list of defining battles, in light of more overt battles like that against ISIS, Russian aggression against Ukraine, or Chinese land grabs in the South China Sea?
In many ways, though, the battle against ISIS and the low-grade, simmering conflicts with Russia and China are also about cyber. Interestingly, we see the three faces of cyber conflict in these three examples.
For ISIS, cyber is a tool for propaganda. For example, the speeches of American citizen and ISIS radical Anwar al-Awlaki are more popular on the Internet today than they were before he was killed by a CIA missile in Yemen in 2011. This is cyber battle as social media.
For Russia, cyber is a weapon. For example, the denial of service attacks against computer networks in Estonia in 2007 and against Georgian media outlets in 2008 show a willingness to disrupt the internal operations of legitimate nation-states. This is cyber as a nonkinetic weapon.
For China, cyber is a business model. Attacking American networks is a career path for members of the People’s Liberation Army, who work 9 to 5 in uniform on espionage and the theft of intellectual property. The F-35 program has been in the crosshairs of Chinese mouse clicks for years. And this is cyber battle that’s “just business.”
China isn’t just a one-trick pony when it comes to cyber, as the recent hack of the Office of Personnel Management showed. The theft of personal data on people with security clearances could compromise national security.
And there are also subsets of this defining battle, such as cyberattack as diplomacy, as illustrated by Stuxnet and a damaged Iranian nuclear program that slowed their race to a bomb and can be said to have culminated in today’s five-nation nuclear deal.
All in all, I agree, cyber is the defining battle of the next decade.
RELATED: Learn more about securing defense and federal networks at C4ISR & Networks and Federal Times’ CyberCon 2015, held Nov. 18 at the Ritz Carlton in Pentagon City, Virginia.
