Information warfare is a very complex term because it can imply anything to do with any piece of information available in the world. If you think about it, there are libraries all over the world filled with information and how much information on the internet probable exceeds the amount in a library tremendously. The first weapon of Information warfare is information collection. Having information can be the turning point in any information usage scenario. Say that you bought a cabinet from the store and it did not come with instructions on how to put it together. Another person bought the same cabinet but theirs did come with instructions. You would figure that the person with the information on how to assemble the cabinet would get theirs assembled first. The same goes with information used in warfare, the ability to collect information will be advantageous to the person or entity planning to use that information.
Information transport is another weapon in information warfare. It is very useful to have a mode of transport for information. In the example above the person with the instruction to assemble the cabinet could surely assemble the cabinet faster, but what if that person left the instructions at their friends’ house. If that were the case then that person would assemble the cabinet just as fast as the person without the instructions, maybe even slower using time to find the instructions that are not available. Having a mode of transport for information that is collected is crucial in weaponizing information. Be it the internet, a network, even floppy disks, being able to get information from one place to another could be a deciding factor in using information in a war.
There is also the protection of the information used in information warfare. Any country in the world has their top-secret information that they cannot let any of their adversaries know about. Whether it be encryption or transport of information just through external drives cutting out the internet, the protection of information is crucial in information warfare. Think about an action movie where a person is transporting information in a briefcase that is handcuffed to their wrist. That is an excellent example of something that is really done with highly sensitive data for say a government contractor. Snowden leaked sensitive data, which is an example of a data breach that needs to be addressed. Those are just three of the weapons of the many used in information warfare. The world we live in will always come up with new information weapons to overcome their adversaries.
source : http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~burnsm/InfoWarfare.html
