Thomas Rid expands on his earlier argument that "cyberwar will not take place":
[T]here is no known cyberattack that has caused the loss of human life. No cyberoffense has ever injured a person or damaged a building. And if an act is not at least potentially violent, it's not an act of war. Separating war from physical violence makes it a metaphorical notion; it would mean that there is no way to distinguish between World War II, say, and the "wars" on obesity and cancer. Yet those ailments, unlike past examples of cyber "war," actually do kill people.
John Arquilla, who invented the concept of cyberwar, counters:
The 2007 cyberwar against Estonia, apparently arising out of ethnic Russian anger over removal of a World War II monument, offered a clear example. The attack was initially highly disruptive, forcing the government to take swift, widespread measures to install security patches, improve firewalls, and make strong encryption tools available to the people. Estonia is small, but one of the world's most wired countries; 97 percent of its people do all their banking online. Costs inflicted by the attacks -- from business interruption and disruption to the need to erect new defenses -- are estimated in the many millions of euros. A scaled-up version of this kind of cyberwar, to America-sized attacks, would cause damage in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
More Dish on cyberwar here.
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