To protect, defend, deter and attack a system, network or generally any information grid, one need to employ resource, personal, and systems of cyber capabilities. Its purpose must be to stay ahead or dominate the operational objectives over its adversaries . These operations are performed through four cyber operational components. Cyber- situational awareness, cyber-network operation, cyber-warfare, and cyber support. For the purpose of our example cyber operation in defense parallel to health sector is discussed below.

All these four components of cyber operations work differently in these two areas of discussion. In a defense sector it’s mainly for spying, espionage even active-war support in cases of protecting the national and political interest of a country. And the parties involved in these are mainly nations. In the case of health sector the adversarial forces can be countries, institutions, private health companies or individuals. And it’s main aim can be stealing intellectual property for an economic advantage.

For example taking one of the four components; Cyber situational awareness in a defense sector can be performed by gathering current information of adversary for example in the modernizations of its network system, learning how far is the adversary going in buying its products from vendors, pre-analyses all systems in the market and search its vulnerabilities and so on. All this is to purposely benefit from spying and espionage over adversary. All the above factors in the case of health sector may be to steal medical or health technology as noted above.

Cyber-operation seemed to be in the domain of government. I think its expensive funds of its personal, resource, time and technical knowledge should always keep it under the constrains of responsible entities, like the defense. Because, these operational-components go down to granular level of searches for vulnerability, non-stop, in my opinion these operations are nothing less than a war-operation; therefore it should be no-where other than where it belongs. It’s hard to imagine what the power of these operations being used by entities other than governmental can bring.

Birhane: Reviewed and written from course material.