Banks, William C. --- "Developing norms for cyber conflict" [2017] ELECD 1278; in Ohlin, David Jens (ed), "Research Handbook on Remote Warfare" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017) 273

Book Title: Research Handbook on Remote Warfare

Editor(s): Ohlin, David Jens

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781784716981

Section: Chapter 9

Section Title: Developing norms for cyber conflict

Author(s): Banks, William C.

Number of pages: 25

Abstract/Description:

The prospect of cyber war has evolved from science fiction and doomsday depictions on television, in films and novels to reality and front page news. As early as 1982, a little-noticed but massive explosion of the trans-Siberian pipeline was caused by malware apparently inserted into Canadian software by the CIA. The CIA and Canadians knew that the software would be illegally acquired by Soviet agents. Although the incident greatly embarrassed the KGB, the Soviets never disclosed the incident or accused the United States of causing it. If a US missile had struck the pipeline, the Soviets would have expressed their outrage publicly and almost surely would have retaliated. As the Internet grew exponentially over the next quarter century, so did the frequency and variety of cyber intrusions. By 2012, reports confirmed that the Stuxnet malware attack on the computers that ran Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was carried out as part of a larger Olympic Games campaign of cyber war against Iran begun in 2006 by the United States and perhaps Israel. This use of cyber-weapons to attack a state’s infrastructure became the second (following the Siberia explosion in 1982) known use of computer code to affect physical destruction of equipment—in this case Iranian centrifuges—instead of disabling computers or stealing data. Like the Soviet Union in 1982, Iran did not acknowledge the cyber-attack.