Future conflicts will be confined to online hacking

Bots once built to brute force and gain access to accounts are now being used to create posts and comments on public forums and social media. Are we in a cyber warfare without even realizing it?

Bots once built to brute force and gain access to accounts are now being used to create posts and comments on public forums and social media.

Below is my speech I spoke on for English Speaking Skills test.

We have all seen in movies, that a guy with a hood in a dark room, rummaging the keyboard, presses Enter and whole internet is down. He can then control and spy on people and much more.

Is this all even realistic and possible? Are we in a new war where 1s and 0s are firing through fiber cables toppling governments??

Are we in a cyber warfare without even realizing it?

Actually, we might just (partially) be in one.

When people think about hacking, they think about filibustering some secret information, or accessing government secrets, spying on people, etc. But the true power of hacking is in the control of people’s mind and thoughts.

The perception of reality and facts itself might just change through tactics employed by hackers. This is being done and will be done with spreading of fake news, obfuscation and jumbling of facts, misinterpretation and more.

These conflicts also happenned in 2016 US presidential election resulting in massive fluctuations of votes and in 2020 with President, inciting violence and subsequent attack on Capitol.

Advancements in AI and Natural Language Processing are definitely being used to guess passwords, infect phones and computers with malware and are harvesting data. As cyber researchers say — Data is the oil of the 21st century and hence protecting against those and also the infrastructure itself is key in maintaining the sovereignty of nations across the globe.

With legacy codebases and old tech being used in military and with weapons of mass destruction along with in top level Government institutes, it is definitely worrying.

But these bots once built to brute force and gain access to accounts are now being used to create posts and comments on public forums and social media. The comments under US presidential twitter handles during election itself tells the whole plot.

Hence, it is safe to say that wars in future will be fought out of plain sight from anywhere anytime across the globe. Misinformation, malicious code, and exploiting of use of social media for national communication will be the battlegrounds of the future, resulting in massive conflicts of interest and stroke to fundamentals of democracy in many countries.

And if we are already at war, then when should we start reckoning the first explosions.