The cables were cut multiple times, despite being buried beneath the Mediterranean seabed, five miles off the Egyptian coast, near Alexandria. As a result, Internet finance and commercial traffic stalled in at least 10 Middle Eastern and Asian countries in early 2008. More than 80 million Web users in India, Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia had connection problems. Egypt and Pakistan alone lost 70 percent of their digital connections to the outside world. “It even affected [U.S. Central Command],” said James Lewis, director of the technology and public policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a [...]
Editor’s note: The following article is one of 30 that we’ve selected from our archives to celebrate World Politics Review’s 15th anniversary. You can find the full collection here. Cyberspace has long been seen as shifting power toward the individual, with attacks over the past decade on corporations, governments and other weighty institutions largely corroborating this view. But while the structure of cyberspace itself will always lend significant and previously unavailable advantages to individuals, we are now entering a period where governments and institutions are beginning to regain the upper hand against asymmetric cyberwarfare. In his 1996 "Declaration of the Independence [...]
In June 2009, a computer worm called Stuxnet was unleashed against the nuclear enrichment plant at Natanz, Iran. Designed to infect the operating system used by the Iranians to control their nuclear centrifuges, Stuxnet significantly disrupted, and thus delayed, Iranian nuclear efforts, according to a New York Times report on Jan. 15, 2011. The Times report also provided a breathtaking peek behind the scenes of what appears to have been a large and complex covert operation to develop the Stuxnet worm. If the revelations are true, then the Stuxnet attack provides significant insights about the potential character of war by [...]
