Call for cyber defense, global cooperation

Following US media reports in late July that the Barack Obama administration plans to take revenge on China for "cyberattacks", Bloomberg reported on Friday that computers of American Airlines and Sabre, a US company which runs an air travel reservation system, might have been attacked by China-based hackers. On Monday NBC news reported that Chinese hackers have been accessing the private emails of top US national security and trade officials since April 2010.

This has raised fear among people that tensions between China and the US may intensify, with some even saying a large-scale cyber warfare seems unavoidable, which, in turn, calls for the need to clarify the concept of cyber warfare. In general, people equate cyber warfare with "destroying enemy telecommunication devices" or "hacking enemy databases" as in a real physical war, which, in fact, is only a small part of it.

Conflicts in cyberspace are not new, and cyber warfare can be defined as activities to gain advantage in public opinion or export ideologies through online channels, or activities to obtain intelligence and carry out surveillance to do so.