Despite what the media likes to believe, there are no watersheds in the history of cyber conflict. Offensive cyber operations simply don’t work that way. You don’t irreversibly leap over the Rubicon, but crisscross it a couple of times to derive reasonable threshold estimates of power projection.
Cyber operations — as the militarised, regimented form of hacking is often called — don’t manifest themselves as precision-guided munitions. They’re more like a game of probability.
Cyber operations thrive on the very architectural ambiguity which plagues the Internet. You hope to tame the unstable cyber weapons while deploying them in a complex adversarial environment, almost entirely uncertain about the results. Retaining the initiative during an ongoing mission is like solving a jigsaw puzzle where half of the pieces lie with the adversary.
You catch a glimpse of this terrifying uncertainty in the wild-eyed glint of cyber operators throughout the globe – from those who breathed life into the Stuxnet computer worm, to retired ‘mercenaries’ like me! It’s for this reason that cybersecurity strategists like Bruce Schneier, Dan Geer and Dave Aitel believe that the Internet is both — a firing range and a war zone.