Inside Cyber Warfare, 2nd Edition

Chapter 16. Cyber Warfare Capabilities by Nation-State

This is a comprehensive overview of nation-states that are involved in standing up a cyber operations capability; however, there are now so many states enabling this capability that it became impossible to list them all in the time provided to write this chapter. This chapter features a survey of the majority of them.

Australia

In a 2009 Australian Defense white paper, the Australian government is taking initiatives to develop and enable a new cyber warfare capability.^[109] It states that the new department will “consist of a much-enhanced cyber situational awareness and incident response capability, and the establishment of a Cyber Security Operations Centre to coordinate responses to incidents in cyber space.”^[110] The words “response” and “defense” are used many times in the paper, with no specific mention to offensive capability. However, it does suggest it will be present with the text “maximize Australia’s strategic capacity and reach in this field.”^[111]

To accomplish this, Australia welcomed the opportunity to increase cooperation with the UK on cyber issues. In January 2011, Australia and the UK announced they will use their existing joint work on cyber security for the foundation of a sophisticated cyber partnership by further expanding the collaboration of their cyber security agencies and departments.^[112]

A few months later, in March, the Australian Security and Intelligence Organization opened a new cyber investigations ...