Page 151 - Cyber Terrorism and Extremism as Threat to Critical Infrastructure Protection

4 Historical and Legal Aspects of Cyber
Attacks on Critical Infrastructure

Andrej Iliev, Ferdinand Odzakov

1 Introduction

With continued evolution of technology, the opportunities and challenges from cyber domain
are rising. We are at a crossroads, as we move from a society already entwined with the
internet to the coming age of automation and Internet of Things. In our everyday lives we can
see that societies around the world more depend on modern technology, the ability to shut
down or destroy critical infrastructure and to take control of machines and vehicles, directly
causes economic losses to become a reality.

An analysis of the history of well-known examples of cyberattacks on critical infrastructure
includes the following:
• In 2008 Russia sent tanks into Georgia, coinciding with a cyber attack on the Georgian
government’s computing infrastructure. This is thought to be one of the first coordinated
land and cyber attacks (Cyber Security Trends 2016);
• Also in 2008, Stuxnet – a computer worm purportedly jointly designed by Israel crippled
Iran’s nuclear-enrichment programme by sabotaging centrifuges;
• In 2014, a German steelworks was disabled and a furnace severely damaged when hackers
infiltrated its networks and prevented the furnace from shutting down;
• In 2015, in an attack which was strongly suspected to have originated in Russia, 230,000
people lost power when 30 sub-stations in Western Ukraine were shut down via a remote
attack. Operators at the control centre were even locked out of their systems during the
attack, and could only watch it unfold (Coldwell, 2016).

In all of these, as an indication of how the landscape of war is changing, the weapon of choice
wasn’t guns or bombs – it was a keyboard. We can expect governments around the world to
strengthen their cyberattack and defence capabilities, spurring an arms race that will operate
at a much faster pace than we saw in the Cold War. But the results could be much more

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