The cyber decade: Cyber defence at a X-ing point

摘要

As a consequence of the numerous cyber attacks over the last decade, both the consideration and use of cyberspace has fundamentally changed, and will continue to evolve. Military forces all over the world have come to value the new role of cyberspace in warfare, building up cyber commands, and establishing new capabilities. Integral to such capabilities is that military forces fundamentally depend on the rapid exchange of information in order for their decision-making processes to gain superiority on the battlefield; this compounds the need to develop network- enabled capabilities to realize network-centric warfare. This triangle of cyber offense, cyber defence, and cyber dependence creates a challenging and complex system of interdependencies. Alongside, while numerous technologies have not improved cyber security significantly, this may change with upcoming new concepts and systems, like decentralized ledger technologies (Blockchains) or quantum-secured communication. Following these thoughts, the paper analyses the development of both cyber threats and defence capabilities during the past 10 years, evaluates the current situation and gives recommendations for improvements. To this end, the paper is structured as follows: first, general conditions for military forces with respect to "cyber" are described, including an analysis of the most likely courses of action of the West and their seemingly traditional adversary in the East, Russia. The overview includes a discussion of the usefulness of the measures and an overview of upcoming technologies critical for cyber security. Finally, requirements and recommendations for the further development of cyber defence are briefly covered.