WEAPONS OF INFORMATION WARFARE

UNIT 4

INFORMATION WARFARE AND CYBERSECURITY

TEXT FOCUS

Task 1. Read the text carefully paying special attention to the words and word combinations in bold.

INFORMATION WARFARE: WHAT AND HOW?

Many people today are talking about the impact of information technology on the world. They are discussing how business, the economy, education, and even personal relationships are being affected by the onset of the information age. It should come as no surprise, then, that people are also talking about how technology is impacting the way we engage in one of our oldest traditions - war. The term "information warfare" has been in use for a number of years now, intended to represent whatever warfare is becoming in the information-centric21st century. Unfortunately, though, many people use this term without really knowing what it means. In an effort to make progress toward a common definition, this paper presents one possibility and expands on it by discussing the weapons, strategies, and countermeasures involved in "information warfare", as defined.

DEFINING INFORMATION WARFARE

If there were a single, obvious definition of information warfare, someone would have already written it down. The fact that no one has done so indicates that perhaps no simple definition exists. Those in the IW community have come to agree that information warfare is not a single, simple thing, that it has many complex dimensions. Noted information warfare author Martin Libicki articulates this position in his book What is Information Warfare? He states that "Coming to grips with information warfare...is like the effort of the blind men to discover the nature of the elephant: the one who touched its leg called it a tree, another who touched its tail called it a rope, and so on. Manifestations of information warfare are similarly perceived. Taken together all the respectably held definitions of the elephant suggest that there is little that is not information warfare."

Unfortunately, agreeing on the fact that IW has many dimensions does little to further our understanding of it. Luckily, opinions are diverging on some things but converging on others. There appears to be a subset of topics that are generally agreed upon by the IW community as falling inside the realm of information warfare. For the purpose of this discussion, we define "information warfare" as the topics in that set. Specifically, we talk about information warfare as a class of techniques, including collection, transport, protection, denial, disturbance, and degradation of information, by which one maintains an advantage over one's adversaries. Although this discussion focuses on the more traditional military notions of information warfare, the above definition can certainly be applied in any competitive situation, public or private, civilian or military.

WEAPONS OF INFORMATION WARFARE

Having established a definition of information warfare, the next logical question is - what do we need to be involved in it? Specifically, what are the weapons of information warfare? To answer this question, we look at each of the techniques mentioned above and give a brief overview of the most common weapons used to achieve them.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 1175