Cyberwarfare

Catalog description

Einstein once said, "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." The answer to part one of his statement is here: World War III will likely be a cyber war. Election hacking, power grid cyberattacks, troll farms, fake news, ransomware, and other terms have entered our daily vocabularies and are here to stay. This course aims to introduce students to the cyberwarfare landscape: the actors, capabilities, techniques, impacts, legal and geopolitical issues, and defense systems it necessitates. How has the threat of cyber war transformed our definitions of privacy and security, on individual, national, and international planes? We will dive in with specific case studies, such as power grid cyberattacks, and we will perform cyber tabletop exercises. The first half of the course establishes the technical foundations needed for understanding cyberspace; the second half approaches the problem from different angles, attempting to understand the repercussions of technological, legislative, and political changes.