Cyber Armies - Basics

Cyber armies are becoming more popular as tech-patriots and a specialized force because every country not only depends on their armies and soldier who fight in the battle arena, but also an external fight through technologies. It is not about world war and warfare through nuclear missiles and bombs, it is about cold warfare through cyber-attacks. But the question resides how, why, where and in what way does this new form of warfare will affect nation and the citizens?

The formation of cyber armies is done with intense training and understanding of technology and the unusual fact that technology has no limitation. Since the entire world and each & every entity is connected via technical gadgets, it becomes easy for hackers to hack into any assets of any country, states, organization, firms or even houses. To tackle such huge attacks and secure the nation's asset, cyber armies and their special teams are trained. Cyber warfare is a new term that mentions about how technologies are implemented to disrupt activities of state and nations and leading to a digital war.

Cyber armies can be broadly categorized into two major sub groups –

First who protect their nation and nation-related resources from outside attackers. Some of them drove their focus and dedication in the form of patriotism while other get trained on each concept and protect their system as a part of government agencies.

Second who attack foreign systems and networks either for their self made purpose or on a broader interest.

The 21st century has seen the rise of this new kind of warfare that is silent yet deadly, a type of warfare that do wrong to nations and citizens without the use of guns, ammunition and bombs. The biggest threat of this generation is a smart rogue actor with a tablet or a laptop and a desire to take over any huge system. Cyber warfare is probably the greatest challenge which the nations all over the world is facing and are in prior danger of how to save the world from such a menace. Cyber warfare has all the possible advantages over other form of war. This is an invisible battlefield where few hackers can start a war. In the year 2010, a computer virus name Stuxnet is believed to damage a secret nuclear weapon plant. Stuxnet targets PLCs (programmable logic controllers) which are planted in factories and industrial plants.

A team of cyber armies can have a cyber weapons that can shut down the power grid, or imbalance the wall-street, overflow the bank traffic with unwanted data, malfunction ATMs, water plants etc.

One must also keep in mind that technologies are used to run military and air force vehicles, which uses GPS and advanced encrypted network for communicating with each other. But do not underestimate the hackers of any cyber army. They are far more trained and intelligent to crack military grade technologies and hence you can blind nation’s military system, vehicles and devices which run on technology; which military intelligence team might need days to detect and fix such issues. Moreover, as a common man, it is terrifying to learn that modern nuclear missiles also use technology and cyber armies can possibly break into the system with silence and trigger one!

Almost all the super power countries are equipped with powerful and trained cyber armies and the list is not ending here.

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