Political and legal influences of cyber wars

Earlier, hacking mostly used to occur at institutional levels where for instance the main unit could be logged into and classified information accessed by unauthorized people. Nowadays, however, this has spread to the national level with countries having serious cases of hacking. It is believed that this is fuelled by a number of political and legal influences and this will be the focus of discussion in this paper.Since the 20th century, people have understood war to be a conflict that involves kinetic weapons such as bullets, missiles, machine guns, aircraft carriers, fighter jets, and sometimes ships and submarines.

However, the coming of the 21st century brought in the use of internet-based technologies in fights. This is a form of cold war since there are no physical fights but people are combating anyway.Cyberwars can occur within or without to country and are mostly fuelled by several factors among them political and legal influences. For example, on June 1, 2012, David Sanger of the New York Times reported that the United States together with Israel had developed the Stuxnet computer worm that was used to attack Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities.

This is mostly due to political reasons (Fidler, 2013). Most specifically, the United States and Iran have been enemy states for quite some time due to Iran’s links with terrorist activities and this may have been the most probable reason for the attack. When the computer worm was discovered in 2010, experts considered Stuxnet a cyber weapon due to its complexity, the reason why it was created, and the way it worked. It exploited several vulnerabilities in the Windows software and targeted industrial control systems in Iran.

This is the extent to which countries target each other using technology as a result of political feuds (Fidler, 2013).Just like Stuxnet, the Flame Virus that operated as an espionage tool because it added and removed some information from computers was discovered. This was found in computers mostly in the Middle East with again Iran being the most affected. This led to&nbsp.the speculation that again it might have been the United States that propagated this virus. Other sources argued that the source of the virus might have been Israel too.

Such a virus can be used in a legal context in that information such as witnesses reports can be altered thereby affecting the whole legal process (Fidler, 2013). This is the extent to which legal issues fuel cyber wars.