“Cyber warfare turns networks into contested terrain.” It describes the use of digital operations by states or state-backed actors to penetrate, disrupt, degrade, or manipulate an adversary’s systems for strategic effect. Unlike ordinary cybercrime, cyber warfare is tied to geopolitical objectives, military planning, coercion, or conflict signaling.
Executive Summary
Cyber warfare refers to the use of cyber operations as an instrument of state power. It can involve espionage, sabotage, information disruption, or pre-positioning inside foreign networks for use during crisis or war. The term matters now because critical infrastructure, logistics systems, communications networks, and military support chains all depend on software and connectivity. Recent warnings from CISA and partner agencies about Volt Typhoon’s efforts to pre-position inside U.S. infrastructure sharpened the term’s practical relevance in 2024.
The Strategic Mechanism
- States use cyber operations because they are comparatively cheap, deniable, scalable, and often difficult to attribute in real time.
- Operations can serve different purposes: intelligence collection, battlefield shaping, coercive pressure, signaling, and preparation for future disruption.
- Attackers often target civilian systems with strategic value, including energy, telecom, finance, ports, and transportation networks.
- Cyber warfare frequently works below the threshold of declared war, making response options legally and politically contested.
- The most consequential campaigns combine technical intrusion with timing, deception, and broader diplomatic or military objectives.
Market & Policy Impact
- Raises demand for cyber resilience spending across energy, telecom, transport, and defense-adjacent sectors.
- Pushes governments toward new doctrines on deterrence, attribution, and proportional response.
- Forces regulators to treat cyber risk as a national security issue, not just an IT issue.
- Increases pressure on operators of critical infrastructure to segment networks and harden supply chains.
- Expands the role of alliances and joint advisories in cyber defense and incident response.
Modern Case Study: Viasat and the Opening Phase of the Ukraine War, 2022-2024
In February 2022, as Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a cyberattack on Viasat’s KA-SAT network disrupted satellite communications used in Ukraine and spilled into parts of Europe. The incident affected thousands of modems and highlighted how cyber warfare can be synchronized with kinetic military action. Viasat later said roughly 30,000 customer terminals were impacted, while European and U.S. authorities linked the operation to Russian military intelligence. The case mattered because it showed cyber operations being used not as isolated hacks, but as part of a wider warfighting campaign. It also involved real cross-border economic consequences, since connectivity loss affected civilian and commercial users outside the immediate battlespace. By 2024, CISA Director Jen Easterly and allied agencies were using incidents like this to argue that cyber conflict planning must now include infrastructure resilience, vendor security, and alliance-level response coordination.