The Deutsche Welle conducted an interview with the Director Cyber Policy and Resilience Program at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies and Director of the GCSC Initiative and Secretariat Dr. Alexander Klimburg on the threats in cyberspace.
“When people talk of a cyberattack they often refer to espionage activities and other breaches of confidentiality, while an attack in the context of international law means a use of force or an armed attack, which effectively means death and destruction,” said Alexander Klimburg, author of ‘The Darkening Web — The War for Cyberspace’ in an interview with DW.
An initial cyber attack needn’t cause death or destruction. However, it may lead to that, for instance, through a critical mass of misinformation — whether it’s automatically produced by online bots or vague truths and vague lies spread by state actors.
It’s what Klimburg calls the “weaponization of information.” And that brings us to the second problem: cyber space is an entirely new theater of war.
“Cyberspace is effectively a completely artificial fifth domain that has been added to air, land, sea and space,” says Klimburg.
It’s often compared with nuclear energy or chemicals.
Both can be used for good and bad, and yet we seem to have landed on a kind of ethical and legal footing for their use.
Read the full article here.
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