CW is conceptualised by security expert Amit Yoran, cyber-security chief at the US Department of Homeland Security and vice president of computer corporation Symantec, as the future “primary theatre of operations”. There is a consensus that CW is somet Cultural Competency Guidelines hing noteworthy, but it is not clear if this consensus extends to a common understanding of what CW actually is. It is so new that there is no standard definition to describe it. This leads to one of the most frequent confusions regarding cyber warfare: its relati Cultural Competency Guidelineson to Information Warfare (IW). IW is not unproblematic in definition, but can be understood as the “offensive and defensive use of information and information systems to deny, exploit, corrupt, or destroy, an adversary’s information, information-based processes, information systems, and computer-based networks while protecting one’s own”. While IW covers the territory of cyber warfare, it also covers a much broader mandate. Electronic (‘cyber’) communication is only one aspect of IW, which includes all information operations in a conflict. Chinese strategist Sun Tzu and Napoleonic strategist Carl von Clausewitz referred to information operations, and the importance of such operations in war. IW predates electronic communication, and is not interchangeable with cyber warfare for this reason. CW involves units organized along nation-state boundaries, in offensive and defensive operations, using computers to attack other computers or networks through electronic means. Hackers and other individuals trained in software programming and exploiting the intricacies of computer networks are the primary executors of these attacks. These individuals often operate under the auspices and possibly the support of nation-state actors. In the future, if not already common practice, individual cyber warfare units will execute attacks against targets in a cooperative and simultaneous manner. Analyzing the Threat. In 2007, a denial-of-service attack was launched every 53 minutes. The 2007 FBI/Computer Security Institute study indicated that loss of revenue attributed to DDoS (dedicated denial of service) was appro Cultural Competency Guidelines ximately US$90,000 an hour for a retail catalog sales company. Malware is a common cyber-weapon. Malware (short for malicious software) is a computer program designed with malicious intent. This intent may be to cause annoying pop-up ads with the h Cultural Competency Guidelines ope you will click on one and generate revenue, or forms of spyware, Trojans and viruses that can be used to take over your computer, steal your identity, swipe sensitive financial information or track your activities. At least five new pieces of malware emerge every two minutes, according to>