Governments around the world are paying more and more attention to cyber security issues. This trend can be seen in recent news reports of attempts to build cooperation between nations in this area and the development of legislation such as CISPA or SOPA. This trend may be attributed to the fact that law enforcement agencies today do not have a solid legislative base and necessary experience in combating cybercrime. It is the need to catch up on what has been lost in past years to build an effective cyber security system now and in the future that accounts for their activism.
Who is threatening global cybersecurity today? First and foremost, it is terrorist groups whose goal is cyber terrorism. It is this type of cyber threat that poses the greatest danger, as it targets infrastructure (nuclear power plants, flight control centers) directly. The next type is webactivists, who express their opposition to an event through hacking and other types of cybercrime. Finally, the last type is associations of independent hackers who come into contact with each other under fictitious names to conduct some kind of joint action. Each type requires a different approach, requiring different countermeasures.
Different perceptions in the international community of the problem of cybercrime significantly complicate the signing of a single global document, capable of becoming a legal framework to combat cybercrime. There are two main problems that exist at the moment. First, many countries do not have a definition of cybercrime, and it is extremely difficult to unify it on a global scale. Second, there are different attitudes to this phenomenon around the world. Somewhere it is a crime, and somewhere it is just a violation of public order.
A number of experts believe that antivirus software developers have a certain interest in feeding the illusion of fear of cybercrime, since the development of new programs brings them a lot of income. It is possible that partially this version has the right to exist.
Indeed, despite all the rhetoric about the threat of cyberterrorism, in the last ten years we can think of only three really large-scale cybercrimes. These are the 2003 blackout in the U.S. Northeast, the attack on Estonia, and Iran’s nuclear facilities. Despite the significant scale of these attacks, their frequency is low.
Is a global cyber war possible and will there be a winner? Another question that many politicians and experts are asking. At present, cyber war seems unlikely and can only serve to support the foreign policy actions of one or another state. In the global cyber war, there simply can be no winners and losers, because it is extremely problematic to assess the damage and combat losses.
