Cyberwar "a reality that must be halted"

"There is a cyberwar going on," Hamadoun Toure, secretary general of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), said during a cybersecurity debate at the Geneva Press Club.

"Just like a conventional war, there are no winners, only destruction," he warned an audience of reporters, diplomats and technology experts.

While Toure declined to pin the blame on individual countries, he said that such attacks have become common.

Russia was widely blamed for what has been dubbed the world's first cyberwar, in 2007, when state and bank websites were blocked for days in Estonia, one of the world's most wired nations that is a member of NATO and the European Union.

Since then, attention has focussed on China for alleged state-run cyber attacks on targets in the United States and elsewhere.

Hackers, governments involved

In recent weeks, pro-regime Syrian hackers and North and South Korean online fighters have also made headlines.

"In an increasingly connected and Internet-dependent world, cyber attacks by governments and criminal gangs alike have the potential to wreak havoc on everything from the financial sector to key public services," Toure said.

"This raises the spectre of huge economic losses and social chaos," he added. Toure said governments and businesses worldwide must think collectively about how to stop these attacks.

"No one single entity can do it alone. We have to change the mindset. Are we mentally prepared to work with one another?" he asked.

"In this arena, there's no such thing as a superpower anymore," he said, given that is it cheap to create viruses and launch attacks.

"It's the human brain that's driving these attacks so we're all equal in this and we need to come together. That's the new order. It's not up to just one country," he said.

It's not like a nuclear power, where the technology, the knowledge base, the infrastructure and the funding are required. We have to treat cyberspace as we treat the real world," he added.

"What's true in the real world is true in cyberspace. Some people say we're in a new environment where the rules are completely different, but we're not, because humans are at the centre of these attacks," he added.

Source: AFP via I-Net Bridge