What is Information Warfare?

Information warfare has become the latest strategy in the never-ending war machine. It is using non-lethal attacks with information to disrupt their enemies’ information systems. The anatomy of information warfare is quite interesting as its main attacks are on electronic transmission, cyber attacks, and psychological operations. The Russians are notorious for the use of information warfare to cripple their neighboring countries. One way that information warfare is used to cripple electronic transmission systems is by jamming military communications or weapon guidance systems. This can have a very disastrous effect and the military should spare no expense in preventing such attacks. It can also target civilian uses like air traffic control, which prevents two planes from crashing into each other. Another example is to attack the Rail Traffic Management system which trains are fully controlled by.

Cyber attacks are a common place for information warfare also as disrupting computers for business can have a disastrous effect on a country. Say that the stock market was victim to a cyber attack rendering the stock market useless, which would put a big dent in the financial market. A socialist country could use that kind of an attack to try to cripple capitalism to push an agenda of some sort. I am sure that the government has many teams in place to work at preventing these types of cyber attacks. In the future maybe a mind reading apparatus that flies around in the sky marking areas where deception is taking place while alerting authorities who will sweep in and subdue the criminals could prevent a cyber attack. Another thing of great concern that a cyber attack could potentially target is a nuclear power plant. That could be catastrophic if the attack could trigger some sort of melt down and render a whole area of a country useless.

Lastly, there are the psychological operations that could degrade a nation’s morale by flooding social media with fake news. I read a substantial amount of fake news on social media and the President of the United States is always warning us about fake news. Psychological operations in information warfare are a big concern in today’s world. Being that the information on the internet is available to anyone in the world these days, I am sure that people would like to assure the validity of that information. Otherwise, the world will have misinformed people with malicious views due to misinformation, which could cripple a society.

source : https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/12/what-is-information-warfare