Cyber Warfare: Can there be Small Cyber Military Powers?

摘要

The potential that cyber warfare seems to have, and the low economic costs required to implement a cyber army, when compared to the acquisition of means used in conventional warfare, can lead to the massive appearance of the first ones. This may also lead small countries to want to become "Cyber Military Powers", although they may not have the conditions, namely economic, to be "Conventional Military Powers" (A. Caldas, 2013; Barbosa, 2018). There are some difficulties, which, however, they would have to overcome in order for it to be possible for them. The human resources necessary for the constitution of a cyber army are very different from those necessary for the constitution of a conventional army. The physical and athletic capacity of cyber troops is important, but intellectual and scientific capacity is fundamental. The knowledge and mastery of computer technology in its various subareas: software, hardware, programming, networks, databases, etc. must be of an excellent level. Obtaining these capabilities takes a long time and may not be possible for anyone to acquire. The propensity for information technology is fundamental, since the capacities and computer skills have much of innate. There are many kinds of cyberwar actions but we consider the Cyberwarfare actions based in the exploiting of computer bugs, and, which may lead to the so-called loss of state sovereignty. In this cases, preferably, these bugs, vulnerabilities, should be unknown, Zero Day Vulnerability, ZDV. To exploit these failures, a program that executes some pernicious action based on exploiting the bug, Zero Day Exploit, ZDE, has to be developed and, in advance, placed on the target computer, (Clark & Knake, 2010), (Singer & Friedman, 2014). Countries wishing to become future cyber military powers need: (1) Capacity to form cyber army whose cyber troops have the indicated characteristics, (2) Get ZDEs that can be used on your opponent's computer systems and (3) Be able to exploit the ZDEs and use them to inflict damage on their opponents, (Barbosa, 2018), (Arquilla & Ronfeldt, 1993). These capabilities, perhaps, can be easily obtained in large countries, particularly in the highly technologically advanced ones, but in small countries, particularly in those less technologically advanced, they might be hard to obtain.