Micro-cyberwar vs. macro-cyberwar: towards the beginning of a taxonomy
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Micro‑cyberwar vs. macro‑cyberwar: towards the beginning of a taxonomy Paul Levinson1 Accepted: 13 September 2020 © Springer Nature Limited 2020
Abstract This essay proposes and begins a taxonomy of cyberwar, with a fundamental dichotomy between micro-cyberwar, as in attacks on individual email and automobiles, and macro-cyberwar, defined as all-out attacks on the infra-structure of society, such as hospital systems and air-traffic control. Although both can be deadly, the scale of death and destruction is usually much greater in macro-cyberwar, and it would be useful for public figures to address this dichotomy when discussing cyberwar. Keywords Hacking · Email · Automobiles · Espionage · Cybercrime · Warfare I would say there are at least two kinds of cyberwarfare. What I think of as the macro-kind, as when one nation takes over another’s infra-structure, including, at its worst, the nation’s health care, transport, and/or nuclear facilities. This can result, at its worst, in millions of deaths—something which has not happened as yet, certainly nothing that has resulted in such numbers of deaths. And then there’s what I think can best be classified as the micro-kind of cyberwar, as when a foreign power hacks into someone’s car, in a nation deemed to be an adversary. This preliminary essay will be about the micro-kind—an attempt to define it, in contrast to cybercrime on the one hand, and macro-cyberwar on the other, and to therein lay the groundwork for a taxonomy of cyberwars (see Levinson 2017, for some earlier analysis of cyberwar). Walton’s (2019) novel Three Laws Lethal addressed how self-driving cars could be hacked with disastrous consequences. The American television series FBI had an episode, “Codename: Ferdinand” (Amann 2019), in which a current automobile in the U. S. is hacked by Russians to make it crash into a tree, with slow-to-deploy airbags. Hacking into a car can certainly cause a large number of deaths, if, say, the car under enemy control was directed to crash into a vehicle carrying explosive materials in a big city.
* Paul Levinson [email protected] 1
Fordham University, New York City, USA
But the scale would still be far less than the deaths that could ensue if a macro-cyber-attack created a Chernobyl-scale disaster in an adversary’s nuclear facility. Macro-attacks are thus more properly guarded against than micro-attacks. Indeed, though macro-attacks have been hypothesized, suspected, and reported—such as the alleged cyber-attack on Iran’s computers during the Obama administration, to stall Iran’s development of nuclear weapon facilities (Sanger 2012)—these are far less frequent than micro-attacks, which can be said to occur every time a personal computer is hacked for any reason by an international opponent. Hacking, which could be defined as any unauthorized access to another person’s data, afflicts all aspects our lives in the digital age, and such incursions for the most part do not rise to the realm of cyberwar, micro or macro. Hacking a friend’s comput
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