Just today it is widely reported the Pentagon is setting a new policy that cyber attacks can be considered acts of war which lets the Pentagon retaliate with conventional weapons. Hack my email, get an ICBM.
Canada for the most part is ultra exposed to hostile foreign nation state propaganda. Whereas USA's cyber army is protecting against this.
the problem with unfiltered internet is that bad actors across the world can simply post upon social media and cause problems. You need some sort of defense against this, but Canada is too broke to afford a legitimate cyber army unlike the rest of the world.
makes sense, enemies of the future are aiming to attack our connectivity in the field of battle( so we can't coordinate a war) and cyber attacks to steal information. Coughcough china.
This proves again how tremendously paranoid we have become in the west. Everything is an attack, and more generally a reason to distrust each other more. Even if the blame is on ourselves for disregarding maintenance.
(not to say that they shouldn't have used a better password, but please, please media stop shouting "cyberwar!!!" at each possible instance)
Why is this cyber "warfare" and not just another way of spying - something all countries do without it being an act of war? The only thing we've seen close to "cyberwar" is Stuxnet and that was most likely the U.S. and Israel.
Another potential explanation is China is preparing for a possible cyberwar and after seeing the USA population manipulated by social networking during elections has decided they want their population to be less vulnerable to outside manipulation.
Even Canada has offensive cyber and has members of the military talking with some regularity about how they use it in completely declassified settings. You can literally buy a ticket to a conference and hear these guys talk about it.
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