Cyber Conflicts: Cyber Warfare - Actors of Cyberwarfare

Cyberwar acts are continually morphing as a variety of actors are strengthening their skills and devise new ways to bolster their cyber arsenals that are growing both in sophistication and scale.

In order to be able to predict and envision how cyber warfare may evolve over time, we turn to examining the current actors and their motivations. So let's look at who these actors are.

The cyber warfare involves several actors including nation states, terrorists, sociopolitical groups. And they all differ in their primary intent and targets.


Nation states aim to weaken the enemy nation to give the attacker wartime advantage. The terrorists generally inflict damage as a revenge, or as a show of strength leveraging it to solicit sponsors and recruits.

And sociopolitical groups create and relevance in political negotiations and policy formulation.

In some cases the distinction between terrorists and social political groups has blurred with groups defined by overlapping motivations.

Social political groups may have the tacit support of government organizations when their objectives align. In addition, secondary players work symbiotically or parasitically with major actors towards their own goals, with political or financial. Engaging in espionage or reconnaissance attacks on the internet infrastructure and the raw cyber vandalism.

The primary actors in the cyber warfare arena are states, non-state actors and international organizations. Arguably, anybody who uses the internet can become an actor in this arena.

Groups of state citizens targeting either their own government or other states, in this case, patriotic hacking, have influenced the course of domestic and international politics, which is a game changer.

In the past, states mostly watched on the sidelines as noisy hackers demonstrated their hacking skills by hacking each other's websites, often for bravado with little real impact.

Over the last few years, however, states have become the most active players in the cyber arena. Governments, military, and intelligence agencies have recognized the potential harm that cyber attacks could inflict on their countries information and communication infrastructure.

It's physical infrastructure, economy, as well as potential benefits of a cyber arsenal for counter attack and first strike capabilities.

So far, states have primarily focused on identifying vulnerabilities in enemy infrastructure, espionage, and intelligence gathering, but their stats are increasing acquiring hacker assets to be able to stay ahead of their adversaries in developing strategic cyber warfare capabilities. Several countries, including the United States, Russia, China, and Israel have gathered formidable arsenals of cyber weapons. However, they remain weak in defending against sophisticated cyber attacks. The point to note here is that, as we are collecting all of these cyber arsenals, the basic premise that the cyber ward is a stabilizer and equalizer against discrepancies. And the current expanse of countries is changing.

More money, more resources are giving more leverage to countries with more resources to have a better cyber arsenal. For the strategic advantage which some of the foreign countries have in being able to launch cheap and dirty attacks is changing. And the attacks are getting much more sophisticated. And there's a huge asymmetry in defense and offence, there are multiple targets to defend, when only a few vulnerabilities could be exploited for a successful attack. Therefore, most countries are fairly weak at defending against cyber attacks.

A major fear has been cyber attacks launched by Islamic terrorists, some of whom had demonstrated some initial hacking promise.

However, the fear of attacks by terrorists on critical infrastructure have not been realized.

And the threat of extreme harm posed by non-state actors has thus far proved unfounded.

Most of the attacks from such non-state actors are focused on propaganda and publicity to mobilize people to join their cause and join their fights.

But such cyber attacks have not directly caused much substantive damage. Sophisticated cyber attacks are no longer a matter of a viskit program, or executing a spectacular attack, but rather rigorous processes that require large investments in manpower, training, computing, equipment, and intelligence.

Most non set actors are unable to compete with the resources of large states. They, however, continue to effectively use social media and other web resources for fundraising, propaganda, and member recruitment.

The arena of cyber warfare has expanded steadily as internet connectivity and the number of individuals willing to use internet for political objectives grows. For instance, some attacks launched during the Russian conflict with Georgia, Estonia and involved Russian citizens, who prompted by nationalistic zeal work in mass to launch attacks against government and business websites in Estonia and Georgia. This has raised a spectrum of different form of war field, a cyber war that is conducted by civilians of one country against government institutions and civilians in another country but may or may not be state sanctioned or even controlled by the military of the state. Citizens are also involved actively in fomenting unrest against national governments in response to propaganda, information warfare of other countries. The Arab Spring triggered fear among many authoritative leaders of similar social, social media field revolutions. Which are in turn prompted them to constantly scour the network for activity that may catalyze into an uprising similar to the Arab Spring.

Ironically, even those days may store public outrage and basically support several attacks against adversaries. The same important citizens can strike back at the state to bring political change in their own countries. In addition to states, non-state actors and civilians, international organizations such as the United Nations, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, NATO and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization have become key players in fostering International cooperation aimed at reducing the threats to international peace, peace, and security posed by a possibility of full scale cyber warfare. The activities of each of these international organizations have, however, often reflect the narrow strategic interests of key state members. And despite strong rhetoric about cyber cooperation, and limiting the potential of conflicts, negotiations toward agreements and treaties often exhibit crucial differences among these key states and of the international organizations compose of these states.

An absence of this consensus is also influenced by insufficient credibility of international organizations to provide guarantee of compliance. With any cyber arms control or cyber peace treaties signed by member states.

Fundamental problems in actor definition lie in actors serving as proxys for others and in differing perception of actors. First, the distinction between state and non-state actors is often blurred because these non-state actors often have tacit and financial support as at the patronage of government organizations, such as Hezbollah being a proxy for Iran, the Russian Business Network being a proxy for Russian government and the Hidden Lynx hacking group being a proxy for the Chinese government. All of this are basically attributions to different organizations without concrete proof.

It is very difficult to prove the nexus conclusively, hence this ambiguity.

Second, the definition of terrorism differs based on perception. A social activist for some could be a terrorist for others. They have been making the distinction even fuzzier. For example, the cyber terrorism has been used to describe Al Qaeda's use of we to influence Young Muslim United States and Europe to join jihadis aimed at achieving Islamist objectives. Of course, some of the same protesters that have been initially categorized as cyber activists by using social media in protests against the Kadafi regime in Libya and the Assad regime in Syria, are now categorized as cyber terrorists because they also support implementation of sharia and establishment of Islamic states. And politically, in the case of Syria, use the internet to call upon Muslims in Europe and the United States to come join in the jihad against Assad's regime.

So this is a complex scenario.