By Sule Sani.
The author.
Coflicts between people is a normal phenomenon for human beings, but the act of cyber conflict is a recent phenomenon. The whole idea of attacking computers and software’s was absent not until the late 1950’s and early 1960’s but then it was geared towards the quest for money and not as a conflict. In the 1970’s cybercrimes such as embezzlement, bank fraud and many others came to existence. In the 1980’s the first teenagers began hacking as a means of having fun during that period there was an outbreak of an attack on the internet which was a computer worm made by a college student who was experimenting. Cyber conflicts intensified and people began hacking for social and political reasons as well. While Donn Parker tried to understand cybercrimes he noticed that this people operate in groups and formed networks (Parker, 1976 pg 51). There are various types of cyber conflicts but this article clearly examines three types of cyber conflicts which are: Hacktivism, electronic jihad and patriotic hacking. In understanding Hacktivism it just a combination of hacking alongside social and political activism. Also this happens to be the vastest area in cyber conflicts because it can consist of both large and small groups of activist also touching international bodies having a get together on the internet. Examples of such activist are government institutions (national and international bodies inclusive), non-state groups as well as business groups. The second electronic jihad simply has to do with cyber-attacks that support al-Qa’ida (terrorist group). Those involved here could be government as well as non-government officials around the world but laying emphasis on the Western world and the United States of America. Three type of attacks are involved in this case which are; the infiltration of computers to get hold of
personal information, also sensitive information such as getting peoples credit card numbers, and lastly directly intruding into government networks. The third which is patriotic hacking covers state-on-state conflict. But in this case the government isn’t involved rather the citizens and expatriates do the attacking so as to defend their various countries or ethnic origins. This attack is mostly carried out thru websites and even emails of countries wanting to harm the interests of their countries. In concluding terms we can notice that cyber conflict isn’t mainly a state/government activity it’s rather a network of people who come together with common goals. Cyber conflicts have their good and bad side but to me the bad outweighs the good. Good in the sense that it’s a conflict in which people dot loss their lives in the process and after the attack services come back to normal. Notwithstanding taking my stand on this issue I clearly disagree with the use of cyber conflicts with reasons to back up my point. Firstly cyber-attacks inflict a high financial cost/burden on their target in the sense that after the attack they need huge finances to be able to restore their services, data which demands for a lot of resources which need to be put together. Whereas this money put in for the damage caused by cyber-attack could be used and put into other things such as development, infrastructure and many more. Also in years to come with the advancement of technology cyber conflicts may turn out to be more destructive and why not deadly. Again some consequences of this cyber-attacks are it could deactivate the 911 service and even disrupt some health care facilities in hospitals thus in case of emergency this services wouldn’t be reachable which is some sort of a disaster because it endangers the life of many people. Haven said all that I strongly stand against cyber conflicts.
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