Cyber warfare, crime, terrorism or full-scale war?

Although cyber warfare alludes to violent conflicts in cyberspace, we have to explore the extent and by that, we have to distinguish between several different types of violent behavior that are treated as warfare.

• Crime is usually synonymous for individuals or organized groups who exploit systems in the cyberspace in order have some sort of a gain, usually financial benefit or competitive advantage. This is common among individuals who attack systems such as banks or online stores either for financial benefit or identity theft, which are most common types of Internet crime. Also, corporations employ individuals or groups in order to break into systems usually owned by the competition in order to extract information in order to gain competitive advantage.
• Terrorism, is associated with organized groups or individuals who often have a political motivation behind the conducted attacks, they hijack systems in order to secretly pass information to groups inside other countries, deface WebPages in order to display some political content or hack into government systems in order to find information.
• A Full-scale war would be a scenario where people are tasked and backed by governments in order to defend own and attack other countries systems with an objective to establish cyberspace superiority and disable enemies any sort of communication or operational capabilities. Although this sounds a bit too much, there have already been attacks for which government intelligence agencies and militaries have been accused of conducting them, and there are already separate military commands that specialize in this sort of warfare.

Although more groups and motives can be found, such as attacking systems for personal beliefs and disagreement, like the major attack on January 23-2008 on the controversial “Church of Scientology” where access was denied to its web servers, or personal excellence, skills demonstration or the famous “because we can”, the three groups mentioned above are the ones that potentially do more serious damage.