The Obama administration is introducing a new and convenient excuse to start a war with any country it wants to fight:
The US government is rewriting its military rule book to make cyber-attacks a possible act of war, giving commanders the option of launching retaliatory military strikes against hackers backed by hostile foreign powers.
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Pentagon officials disclosed the decision to the Wall Street Journal, saying it was designed to send a warning to any hacker threatening US security by attacking its nuclear reactors, pipelines or public networks such as mass transport systems. "If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks," an official said.
Unless one wants to use purported cyberattacks as reason to start a war, it is lunatic to consider them as equivalent to a physical attack. That the damage done by a cyberattack could have the same or even harsher than a physical attack is not relevant. A cyberattack is by definition anonymous and it is practically impossible to find out who is responsible for it.
Consider the most trivial form of cyberattacks, a denial-of-service attack which overwhelms a servers capacities like some government websites in Estonia experienced after Estonia managed to piss off some Russian nationalist scriptkiddies.
Thanks to Microsoft maleware and computerviruses can easily get installed on millions of PCs anywhere without their users knowledge. Such pieces of software can be controlled from afar and can be used to mass-attack other machines. The controlservers do not need to reside in the same country as the machines that take part in the actual attack. The controlservers themselves will likely be remote-controlled from far away and the route to the attacker may very well be untraceable.
An attack that does real damage, like deactivating powerplants, would likely be more sophisticated than a trivial botnet attack on a website. Professional planers and programmers would likely take some serious efforts to avoid any hints of its real origination.
Any cyberattack with a trace back to some assumed originator must very reasonably be seen as a false flag operation. Israel wants the U.S. to attack Iran? What better method than but to create a virus that does some damage in the U.S. while being traceable back to Iran?
On who then would the Pentagon release its response in the case of an anonymous attack or even in the case where it has some hints to the originator which may or may not be false?
The new policy does not have any deterrence effect. With some efforts anyone with a decent education in computer programming and networks can initiate a cyberattack. Ideological driven single actors or small groups are not deterred by military threats from a foreign country. Any official state attacker could easily hide its responsibility.
The only sense the announcement of the new policy makes is in preparing its abuse as a tool to start new wars.
Would Iran have been justified to send a missile through the smokestack of an U.S. frigate in retaliation of the STUXNET attack on its enrichment plant? The new Obama policy seems to answer that question with a resounding "Yes."