Why are cyber attacks like the one recently in the news by China not seen as as acts of war?
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A lot of times, we have a pretty good idea of who is doing an attack, but we aren’t 100% sure as a lot of these things are difficult to prove. Yeah maybe it is a Chinese IP, but does that mean the Chinese Government is backing it?
We cannot go to war with a country based on what they might have done. Furthermore, we are doing similar if not worse things in the cyber world to them as they are us. It’s really just an immense game of Tug of War.
The definition of “Act of War” is flexible and unique to each country.
Countries have long, much before cyber even existed, did all sorts of attacks, border skirmishes, raids, economic/trade changes, assassinations, spying, sabotage whatever to each other since antiquity
It needs to reach a certain threshold before you’re willing to go to war over it. In our modern world, that bar is generally quite high.
The US is probably conducting their own cyber activities.
They will at least need to test their capabilities for when they are needed.
I suspect there’s an official definition of ‘act of war’ that they don’t fit. It’s also insane to start a war unless you absolutely have no choice.
Countries are constantly spying on each other, we do it to them, they do it to us. We let their diplomats into our country and they spy on us, and we know about it. The Soviet military used to have regular contact with US Army folks, knowing full-well they were watching them.
You cannot start a war over signals intelligence and espionage, you’d be fighting 100% of the time. Cyber attacks are just another form of these things.
The trick is to get real information out of the enemy without them knowing you got it. Those US soldiers were overtly spying on the Russians (they even had Russian ID cards, given to them by the Russians), but they were also doing more the Russians didn’t know about.
It’s a matter of picking your battles. Besides, allowing constant probing to be the norm means you have opportunity to get more information about them and, if you’re better than them, make their efforts wasted while learning what their capabilities are.
If I got to watch people try to break into my home without them knowing, I’d be much better prepared when they do launch a full-scale attempt.
It is an act of war.
Just because a country does an act of war against you doesn’t mean you have to declare war.
The name of the game in modern international politics is to retaliate cautiously. Poking each other tit for tat but stopping before things get too heated.
Because everyone cyber attacks everyone and only the disruptive and huge ones get attention. The US a few years ago hacked into the powegrid of Russia.
Luckily countries are run by humans and not AI and it has become an unspoken rule that stuff like spy work, hacking and even assassinations are not to lead to full scale war, atleast not between major powers.
And frankly, we are smart enough to know that a war is overkill for a bloody DDoS attack.
Because nobody wants to declare war on China. It’s really that simple.
There isn’t really a rulebook for what countries can and can’t consider an act of war. (I mean there sort of is but it’s not enforceable because who can enforce it?) A country wants to, it could use a minor diplomatic incident as an excuse for war, or it could choose to ignore a major border incursion. For example, Russia could easily claim that the U.S. has committed an act of war by arming and funding Ukraine, but that would effectively commit Russia to actually going to war with the United States, and despite its bluster, Russia does *not* want to do that.
If a country doesn’t consider something an act of war, it’s because they did the math and decided it’s not worth it. Going to war against the world’s second largest economy and third largest nuclear power is going to be a bad idea unless it’s unavoidable. In other words, the people with the power to decide decided that it’s not worth it to potentially start a nuclear war with China over cyber attacks.
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