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“Is There A Common Understanding Of What Constitutes Cyber Warfare? - A grounded qualitative analysis using media, institutional, government and military sources” is available as a PDF document.

This paper applies a qualitative grounded theory analysis to delineate a common understanding of the constitution of cyber warfare from twelve media, institutional, educational, governmental and military sources. Partly motivating this is the need to address the confusion between cyber warfare and what is termed ‘Information Warfare’, a broad discipline encompassing all military information operations. Another motivation is the hypothesis that agreement on the constitution, danger and potential of cyber warfare is unsubstantial or vague, that cyber warfare is a misunderstood or neglected concept, and perhaps even suffers from hyperbole and misrepresentation. Though there is a high public awareness of cyber war, there is little attempt to define the concept in existing literature. This paper unpacks the scope, danger and timescale of cyber warfare according to existing texts, and lays the foundation for an analytical framework of patterned and coherent research. In doing so, it uncovers a surprising amount of agreement in the field, and the following definition of cyber warfare emerges from the study:

• “Cyber warfare is symmetric or asymmetric offensive and defensive digital network activity by states or state-like actors, encompassing danger to critical national infrastructure and military systems. It requires a high degree of interdependence between digital networks and infrastructure on the part of the defender, and technological advance on the part of the attacker. It can be understood as a future threat rather than a present one, and fits neatly into the paradigm of Information Warfare.”

Twelve source texts were used for this research.  These source texts can be downloaded as a single ZIP archive to assist in verification.