http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/world/28cyber.html
An interesting article in NYT about Russia’s and the US approaches to cyber war. Russia favors a kind of “cyberarms” control laws whereas the US favors tighter law enforcement cooperation. As the article concludes, the approaches may not be that different at the end.
China has also been mentioned. From what I heard, Chinese are building their own OS which will be different from the existing ones and which is very covert. Therefore, it may be them who test it on the US, when the article mentions that many of the attack sources cannot be identified.
It’s obious that the wars have been fought already against Estonia and Georgia by alleged Russian extremists as well as by Chinese after the collision of a US spy plane with a Chinese jet fighter.
I didn’t investigate but have heard that during Serbia and Iraq wars, computers and communication networks stopped working. That’s what Russia should be afraid of and it is, as indicated by the proposals to ban insertion of malicious code in OSes as apparently is the case.
More generally, here is a quote summarizing some cyber-weapons:
“logic bombs” that can be hidden in computers to halt them at crucial times or damage circuitry; “botnets” that can disable or spy on Web sites and networks; or microwave radiation devices that can burn out computer circuits miles away.
Although the US obviously leads the way in cyber development (just open the first page of any Business section of a US newspaper and see what companies are mentioned – mostly IT), Russia has attracted some attantion to its code development force and mathematicians. On the other hand, as Mr. Gladwell says, Chinese have an inherent advantage of learning to count earlier than either of the two countries.