According to Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, “we are in the very beginning of the cyber arms race.” Due to technological innovation, wars are now increasingly fought in the digital realm and this has major security implications.
While deterrence assures a high threshold for the use of the most powerful physical weapons, like nukes, this is not the case when it comes to cyber weapons for various reasons. Cyber weapons are relatively affordable and easy to deploy. Furthermore, unlike most physical weapons, cyber tools have deniability. As a consequence, governments are far more likely to use powerful cyber weapons against each other than is true for physical weapons.
Hypponen also thinks that the cyber realm is not where the development of warfare will end. According to him, warfare in the future is likely to involve the use of drones and other robots driven by artificial intelligence (AI). He is especially concerned about the rash development of autonomous weapons, which may happen because “[w]hen you’re in a race, what you don’t do is stop and look around and make sure you’re doing everything carefully.”
Read more: Inside Cyber Battlefields, the Newest Domain of War
