Cyberwarfare: Information Operations in a Connected World, 2nd Edition

Early Attacks: The 1990s

In the early 1990s, few people were aware of the potential threats posed by cyberwarfare activities. The Internet was new, and the minority of citizens who had even heard of the global network only considered it a novelty designed for a very limited audience of computer geeks and academics. One author, Winn Schwartau, wrote a prescient book in 1994 that described how cyberwarfare might materialize. In it, he wrote of conflicts between enemies in which information was the prize—in which computers were offensive weapons and, along with communications systems, were targets forced to defend themselves against invisible attack.

Schwartau foresaw a type of warfare in which information weapons replaced conventional arms. Anyone—not ...