Markus Ranum, a veteran of the network security industry and a noted critic of the cyber war hype, points to another similarity with the Cold War.
Before the debate, the audience voted 24 percent in favor of the motion "The Cyber War Threat Has Been Grossly Exaggerated, " and 54 percent against, with 22 percent undecided.
So perhaps the conference is designed to come up with some new international measures to combat cybercrime or a new Geneva convention to agree some rules of engagement for cyber war fare?
Four experts recently gathered to explore both sides of the issue in an Oxford-style debate on the motion "The Cyber War Threat Has Been Grossly Exaggerated" before an audience at the Newseum in Washington, D.
The "cyber war" started at the beginning of the month when a group claiming to be Saudi Arabian hackers posted the credit card information and other identifying data of thousands of Israelis on line, prompting an international investigation.
Lewis is probably the most respected commentator on cyber affairs in the US and his new position paper for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, The Cyber War Has Not Begun, is a welcome addition to the debate.
In addition, Dr. Leitner is a Professor with the National Center for Biodefense at George Mason University as well as a Senior Fellow and Professor with the Center for Advanced Defense Studies responsible for Terrorism, Intelligence, and Cyber War issues.
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The debate, hosted by Intelligences Squared, featured Bruce Schneier, (chief security technology officer with BT) and Marc Rotenberg (executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center) speaking in support of the idea that the threat of cyber war has indeed been exaggerated.
We now live squarely in the Cyber-war Era and it has massive implications long term.
While the consumer may be unaware of how much security and privacy risk many open and sharing apps and devices involve, enterprise CIOs are very aware and very concerned with the exploding security risks of the Cyber-war Era where social media sharing is cavalierly promoted as riskless.
This was more a cyber-riot than a war, but it forced Estonia more or less to cut itself off from the internet.
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But within weeks, the Pentagon is to announce plans to treat some cyber attacks as an act of war.
The US recently said it would consider cyber attacks an "act of war", and reserved the right to respond to attacks with conventional means if they were found to have been orchestrated by a nation state.
The problem of cyber arms control is akin to the greatest arms control failure of the Cold War, which still persists: the mass distribution of the most produced firearm in human history, the Kalashnikov AK-47.
Well the effects of globalisation and our interdependence with other countries, the new network electronic communications means that we're also vulnerable in other ways - cyber attack bringing down the networks, pandemics, influenza, the First World War, DNA's now on the Internet, energy policy - all of these bring insecurities and potential threats to our country quite apart from...
U.S. officials draw a distinction between cyber espionage and cyberattacks, which have a destructive or manipulative purpose and could be considered an act of war.
The president said that defense spending would be cut as the tide of war receded, but pledged to maintain critical capabilities in areas such as intelligence gathering, orbital reconnaissance and cyber security.
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