The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.
The Pentagon's first formal cyber strategy, unclassified portions of which are expected to become public next month, represents an early attempt to grapple with a changing world in which a hacker could pose as significant a threat to U.S. nuclear reactors, subways or pipelines as a hostile country's military.
In part, the Pentagon intends its plan as a warning to potential adversaries of the consequences of attacking the U.S. in this way. "If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks," said a military official.
By: Brant
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I think we talked about this before here at GrogNews in the wake of the first major publicized Chinese hack of GMail, but I agree with the doctrine that cyber-attack constitutes an act of war *depending on the scale and effects of an attack*.
We obviously shouldn't bomb Lithuania back to the Stone Age if some Lithuanian teenager hacks my Xbox Live account, but some of the factors that would escalate a cyber-attack to an act of war would include:
1) Injury or loss of human life (for example, in a cyber-attack on critical infrastructure).
2) Disruption or damage of critical infrastructure like the power grid, air traffic control, etc.
3) Economic loss: the threshold is hard to define, but I think it has been broad-ranging effects on the economy as a whole, not just a single company and its affiliates.
4) Active participation or passive complicity of the host government.
5) Cooperation of the host government in deterrence and prosecution.
By these standards, China, Russia, and some of the Eastern European countries are playing a dangerous game but still quite far from the threshold of physical retaliation.
-- Guardian
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