Rise of a Cybered Westphalian Age: The Coming Decades [chapter]

Chris C. Demchak, Peter J. Dombrowski
2014 Global Power Shift  
No frontier lasts forever, and no freely occupied global commons extends endlessly where human societies are involved. Sooner or later, good fences are erected to make good neighbors, and so it must be with cyberspace. Today we are seeing the beginnings of the border-making process across the world's nations. From the Chinese intent to create their own controlled internal Internet, to increasingly controlled access to the Internet in less-democratic states, to the rise of Internet filters and
more » ... les in Western democracies, states are establishing the bounds of their sovereign control in the virtual world in the name of security and economic sustainability. The topology of the Internet, like the prairie of the 1800s' American Midwest is about to be changed forever-rationally, conflictually, or collaterally-by the decisions of states. In 2010 the crossing of the Rubicon into the age of cybered conflict 1 occurred with a surprisingly sophisticated, precisely targeted, and undoubtedly expensively produced worm in large industrial control systems. Its name was Stuxnet. As a malicious piece of software, it came as a surprise despite having floated around a year doing nothing but stealthily copying itself. The worm's target was the program controlling centrifuges in Iranian nuclear reprocessing plants. 2 Spread by infected USB thumb drives and the software in printer spoolers, it bypassed the Internet security controls in place against hackers and did not act maliciously until finding We encourage you to e-mail your comments to us at: strategicstudiesquarterly@maxwell.af.mil.
doi:10.1007/978-3-642-55007-2_5 fatcat:v73w77jjdbbqbkxjsi33pxok3m