Cyber Technology Advantages And Disadvantages Essay

Advantages

Apart from clear disadvantages of cyber weapons, mentioned above, there are also advantages. It can be employed together with the conventional means in order to maximize the results. It is also quick and has a certain level of surprise.

To begin with, the notion that a state can be vulnerable to a strategic surprise attack is one of the main discourses in cyber debate. A former US Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta warned of the Cyber Pearl Harbour in 2012, highlighting the dangers of cyberattacks on critical infrastructure. However, this term has appeared in the beginning of the 90s.

The Pearl Harbour analogy appeared to characterize a “bolt-from-the-blue” surprise attack in American political and strategic culture (Goldman and

This, in turn, reduces the probability of using cyber in the first place. Weak states may want to invest in other ventures, rather than cyber, to be sure that they can reach the desirable end result. So the true costs of such attack have a high level uncertainty for weak actors as well, however they may not be prepared to bear the failure costs and may not have enough resources to mitigate them.

Another advantage of cyber technology is that the nature of cyberspace and cyberattacks favour more an attacker. Offense is becoming easier than defense and guarantees anonymity. The Internet was designed to make connections easy and reliable, as security was not in the original thinking of creators. Thus, an attacker has an upper hand to reach the target, at the same time staying anonymous and inflicting damage through cyber means.

Today cyber defense is not perfected and has vulnerabilities that can be exploited. Although it has been greatly improved for the last decade, vulnerabilities still remain, especially in the sector of industrial facilities that proved to be slow in adjusting to current cyber