What’s the News: Cyber attacks undertaken by another nation can be considered an act of war, according to a new Pentagon policy to be released in the next month. If you mess with the US online, the Pentagon has decided, it may retaliate offline, in the form of bombs, missiles, and other very real attacks. One military official sums it up thusly to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story: “If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks.” How exactly this stance will be put into practice, though, isn’t clear.
What’s the Context:
This document is the Pentagon’s first attempt to codify a policy on cyber attacks. It’s in response to several prominent hacks in the last few years: three years ago, US military computers were infiltrated by a virus hiding in a thumb drive; in 2010 Iranian nuclear centrifuges were knocked out of commission by the Stuxnet virus, which seems to have originated in Israel; and just this weekend, major military contractor Lockheed Martin admitted that its systems had breached, though it said no information had been compromised.
It’s an update to ...
"So if you spam the pentagon you could be starting WW3
