What Does Successful Cyber Warfare Look Like?
Solutions Review, Friday, October 13,2023
Conventional shooting or 'kinetic' wars used to end with a clear winner and clear loser, and the closure was palpable in ticker-tape parades, terms-of-surrender signings, and mass discharges of returning soldiers. That, clearly, is no longer the case, exemplified by the seemingly endless analyses during our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that asked a common question: what does victory look like?
A similar question might be asked about other, less-conventional 'wars', for example, the war on drugs, the war on terror, or the war on poverty, all now decades old, and some more than a half-century. It seems we start to ask the 'what does victory look like?' question only after a war becomes protracted, and frankly, when it feels very much like we're losing it.
So it may be time to ask that question - or a version of it - about InfoSec: what does successful cyber warfare look like? Cybersecurity professionals have been battling threat actors since at least the inception of the public internet, so we're starting our 4th decade in this war against the bad guys, and I don't think anyone in the cybersecurity community would say with any degree of seriousness that we're winning, or even moving in the direction of a conventional victory.