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Thankfully, most of us only ever view war through cinema’s camera lens. Maybe we imagine the dense jungles of Apocalypse Now, the ruined streetscapes of Saving Private Ryan or the sloop-wearing soldiers of Gallipoli. But while the brute force physical fighting of war sticks in the popular consciousness, modern warfare is rapidly changing. Now, a far less visible style of conflict threatens to dominate: cyber warfare
Fought without bombs or guns, cyber warfare is becoming a bloodless alternative to what we traditionally think of as ‘war’. But what is cyber warfare exactly, and how concerned should we be about it? To help us tackle this pressing issue through the lens of cyber security in the Asia-Pacific region, we spoke with Deakin Associate Professor Dr Lennon Chang.
From the Australian Government’s perspective, cyber security is defined as the ‘measures used to protect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) systems.’
For Chang, though, the definition of cyber security needs to evolve to better reflect modern contexts.
‘In the old days, when we talked about cyber security, it was always about technology to build up better firewalls, build better cyber technology systems to prevent hacking and denial of service attacks, but now we start to see that these are not the only issues,’ he says.
Chang says that now, cyber security isn’t just about the technology we use to prevent cyber attacks, but about the human forces behind it.
‘Technology itself cannot be used to prevent cyber security [breaches] alone,’ he says. ‘We need to consider the other side of cyber security, like human errors, cyber governance, people’s capacity building, awareness raising, those sorts of issues.’
Cyber security is a global concern. In the past, we’ve seen Russia attempt to influence a US election with cybercrime techniques. Recently, hacking group ShinyHunters struck a deal with company Canvas after stealing the personal information of some 275 million people. But it’s in the Asia-Pacific that cyber security – and cyber warfare – is really starting to become a headline-grabbing concern.
According to a new Interpol report, over 30 percent of crime in the Asia-Pacific is cyber security-related. But while this statistic mostly refers to cyber security and cybercrime at a domestic levels Chang says the real concern in the Asia-Pacific region is international.
‘In the Asia-Pacific region, we start to see a lot of psychological operations, disinformation, the use of technologies to disseminate information that is prone to certain ideologies of certain countries,’ says Chang. ‘We have the South and North Korea, we have Taiwan and China, we even have the debate in the South China Sea areas. We don’t see military drills most of the time, a lot of people can see that they’re using more of the “grey zone areas”, deployingcyber crime to change people’s mind.’
Chang suggests that these ‘unarmed’ conflicts and cyber security threats in the Asia-Pacific are actually bordering on cyber warfare.
Chang says that traditionally, warfare is all about ‘mass destruction or mass damage to the whole of society’. But cyber warfare, on the other hand, is less immediate.
‘The action is more about changing the ideology or changing the idea of people in the country – that should be called cyber warfare,’ he says. ‘It’s not necessarily done by mass destruction, but it’s changing people’s mind and beliefs; there are more psychological operations, in order to – like in Taiwan, for example – let people believe that China is the motherland, that Taiwan as a country belongs to China, or using different ways to change people’s minds in terms of the elections, so that they will be able to carry out the actions that they want.’
Cyber warfare is usually the responsibility of states or those acting on behalf of the state – ‘By individuals, by patriotics, but most of the time it can be run by government supported groups,’ according to Chang. In the case of China and Taiwan’s cyber warfare, we saw examples of this during the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in 2022.
‘They created quite a bit of fake news and misinformation to disseminate messages to the Taiwanese people, for example, about a bomb attack at the airport,’ he says. ‘What’s more worrying is that, at the same time, when they create all this fake news, they actually try to interfere with the internet assets through Denial of Service attacks in Taiwan, so a lot of people won’t be able to visit the websites, say, the Ministry of National Defense to check whether this is real.’
One of the biggest recent technological advances has been the rise of generative AI – and it’s become a big issue in cyber warfare and cyber security in the Asia-Pacific region.
‘This is not only in Taiwan, we see it in Australia as well,’ Chang says. ‘During elections, we see fake news created, mis/disinformation disseminated, supported by Gen AI that can easily create a story that looks more real and more comprehensive, really, than just a piece of work. Without Gen AI, I don’t think these kind of things can be easily done within a minute or two, but now with the Gen AI, once you have a prompt with some ideas, they’ll be written totally 100% straight away by Gen AI, and they will be able to create not only the story but the videos for you based on the prompt you put in.’
For those of us in Victoria, Chang says that Gen A Iand algorithms may well be weaponised at the upcoming state elections.
‘We’ll get the election later this year in Victoria, and [generative AI] will be something that we definitely need to keep an eye on,’ he says.
With those Victorian elections in mind, it begs the question: how can Australia defend against cyber warfare? For Chang, the first port of call is for the government to recognise that cyber warfare is a totally new ballgame compared with traditional warfare.
‘War in the digital era will be very different to war in the old days,’ he says. ‘We don’t need to create mass destruction or kill a lot of people in order to take over a certain country, for example. I’m not saying putting resources in traditional defence is not important, I’m more saying that we need to consider new forms of war, and then come up with some tactics in dealing with that.’
As Chang explains, the Australian government is already focusing on defending against cyber warfare and related grey zone activities.
‘In Australia we’re also introducing the foreign interference-related law and task forces, which is a good direction towards the prevention or countering of cyber warfare,’ he says.
Chang also believes that Australia’s defence against cyber warfare will rely not just on the state, but on individuals, too.
‘There’s always more resources needed in the area, not only in developing technology, but also in the area of cyber awareness, raising the training of the general public in terms of dealing with cyber war-related activities, such as countering mis/disinformation.
With increasing concern over cyber security in the Asia-Pacific region, the question now seems to be: what next? From Chang’s perspective, at least, the future of cyber warfare is a problem that’s unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
‘We will definitely be seeing more and more long-term activities, like we see hacking into a news system, hacking into government systems and the public health systems,’ he says. ‘For these kinds of hacking activities, I can confidently say it’s not going away, and it would be dangerous not to interrogate the intention behind these hackings.’
This means that, for the next generation of cyber security experts in the Asia-Pacific, the battle has only just begun.
Associate Professor,
Faculty of Science Engineering & Built Environment,
Deakin University
