Reshaping of warfare

The wars of future are in the dress-rehearsal stage. They are going to be low-casualty and devastating. They will be short, a few seconds in duration and utterly silent. Not a shot will be fired. It is no exaggeration to say that states could be brought down and the warriors that will do that command keyboards and see the battlefield through a monitor. They are the hackers and they have been busy of late, very busy.



One hacker group known as Fancy Bear has been especially busy. They it was that tried to break into the email of former secretary of state Hilary Clinton, attempted to steal the mails of a manager working on the Lockheed-Martin stealth fighter programme and tried to crack 4,700 Gmail inboxes. Although strenuously denied the cyber fingers are pointing towards Russia as being the engine that drives Fancy Bear.

The hackers have tried to steal the mail of 130 American Democratic politicians, as well as Ukrainian politicians and officials that helped uncover the payments made allegedly to Donald Trump by Paul Manafort the one-time campaign chairman and now finding himself before the American courts accused of money laundering. This is not the product of some fevered imagination, it is a modern reality, and the background scenery for the majority of future conflicts that will be fought between developed as well as undeveloped nations.

The 2007 cyber-attack on Estonia is today recognised as the blueprint for the takedown of an entire state. Estonia at the time was the most ‘connected’ state in Europe. Its financial and physical infrastructures were compromised in minutes as were banks and all broadcasters. In the last summer, there was a global ransomware event that hit 100 countries and in the UK disabled large parts of the National Health Service.



Pakistan is rapidly moving to increased cyber-dependence. That dependence has clear benefits and equally clearly desperate risks. Protection needs to be invested in and quickly and vulnerabilities identified. Being cyber-poor is something we cannot afford to be.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 3^rd, 2017.

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