28 July, 2013

Tangled Web: Cyberwar Fears Pose Dangers of Unnecessary Escalation | RAND

Tangled Web: Cyberwar Fears Pose Dangers of Unnecessary Escalation | RAND: As in the physical world, what one state regards as standard operating procedure may be interpreted as anything but by another state. But in cyberspace, two factors exacerbate the problem. First, because states constantly penetrate one another's computer networks, they can observe many things about each other, but only in partial ways, which could lead to false conclusions and miscalculations. Second, cyberwar is too new and untested for a universal set of standard operating procedures — much less a well-grounded understanding of another state's standard operating procedures — to have evolved.