"Indications are that the next wars will be fought using information warfare and there will be no country excluded from that," says Dr Jackie Phahlamohlaka, manager at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). The CSIR will be hosting the 4th International Conference on Information Warfare on 26 and 27 March at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Cape Town.<\/p>\n
According to Phahlamohlaka "we have witnessed how effective information warfare is … and we have seen what happened to Estonia." Estonia suffered massive cyber attacks in 2007. "Traditional boundaries that used to define countries are no longer important because of the advance in information and communications technology, people have become cyber citizens," he says.<\/p>\n
Phahlamohlaka says that the days that only military hardware determined the outcome of a war are over. Achieving dominance in the modern battle space will be heavily dependent on information-in-warfare – intelligence – and information warfare capabilities.<\/p>\n
He says that military forces, because of the need for operational security, tend to work in isolation. "Increasingly, we are finding that military technologies fit in well with civilian and business activities, but in practice these are done in a disjointed way."<\/p>\n
According to Phahlamohlaka, CSIR command, control and information warfare is a key component of the South African National Defence Force’s information warfare capability development. "We are building a world-class science, engineering and technology capability in the information warfare arena – a combination of research, modelling and simulation," he says. "The conference gives our scientists and engineers and the work we are doing international exposure."<\/p>\n
CSIR researchers will present a number of papers at the conference, including:
– Towards a conceptual framework for cyber-terrorism;
– A model for peace support operations: An overview of the ICT and interoperability requirements; and
– A statistical analysis of large passwords lists, used to optimise brute force attacks.<\/p>\n