The story of Sony warfare attack!

Cyberwarfare has been defined by Wikipedia as “actions by a nation-state to penetrate another nation’s computers or networks for the purposes of causing damage or disruption”. Most of such cyber-attacks in history were undeclared secretive operations by nations. However, such attacks can be performed by terrorist groups, extremists, hacktivists, and international criminal organizations.

Today it is an integral part of many developed nations’ military combat and defense strategy around the world. Whereas some developing countries are investing in Cyber Warfare to increase their capabilities.  The rise of technology has increased conflicts in cyberspace between rival countries in the last couple of decades. The motives behind such attacks can range from espionage, paralyzing the military capability, causing disruption in public life to intellectual property theft.

November 2014, Sony Inc. was brought to its knees as terabytes of their confidential data was stolen by a group of hackers who claimed responsibility for the act and called themselves GOP (Guardians of Peace). They threatened Sony Inc. not to release the comedy movie “The Interview” which apparently believed to have shown their North Korean leader in poor light. It turned out to be a cyber nightmare for Sony Inc as hackers not only stole but publicly released all data. Data included trade secrets, salary, contract information, movies scripts of yet to be released movies, personal information of all Sony Inc employees. They didn’t only steal data they wiped all data from Sony Inc. servers and publicly revealed embarrassing emails of Sony employees. Hackers threatened violence in movie theatres if Sony went ahead releasing the movie and demanded pullback. It was in history the most damaging cyberattack on the United States of America as it became a national security issue as it was no longer about Sony.

We all know the defense capabilities of the most powerful countries in the world in all four domains (water, air, space, and land) are greatest and their ability to defend and attack their rivals on all these domains is enormous and indisputable. But interestingly it is not true when it comes to cyberwars because the above-exampled event proves that even small undeveloped and failed nations can cause heavy damage to developed countries.