Battlefield Korea

Cyber-Warfare

Colonel Xian sipped on his tea as he observed his small cadre of hackers from his office, hard at work. The group, which mostly consisted of young men and women, sat there glued to their oversized computer screens with headphones on and energy drinks strewn about their work stations.

“Kids these days… sloppy and messy,” he thought as he looked at them. “If they were not such exceptional hackers, I would never tolerate such filth.”

Now that war had been declared against the Americans, his unit was free to carry out unlimited and direct cyber-attacks against a plethora of US targets. His specific unit had been tasked with going after the civilian sector of the US economy and making the daily life of Americans difficult. He had 36 highly-skilled hackers in his unit to accomplish this task, which he thought was more than enough. His first order of business was to break his team down into smaller groups and assign them specific regions in America to target. Their main targets were the American entertainment sector and the transportation industry, areas that continually lagged in cyber defense.

One group of hackers was specifically causing problems for Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, and YouTube streaming services, hitting them continually with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and other malicious activity. A different group was hacking into various small towns across the US, shutting down traffic cameras or changing commuter rail times so that people would show up after the trains had already left. Their mission was to cause general chaos and anxiety for the American civilian population and let the people of the United States know that China, though many thousands of miles away, could reach out and touch them wherever they lived. Judging by the comments they were seeing on Facebook, Twitter, and the other social media platforms they monitored, their attacks were having the desired effect. People were becoming increasingly angry about their mundane, boring online lives being interrupted.

As satisfying as it was to know his team was impacting the daily lives of the enemy, he wished his team was able to carry out more malevolent types of attacks, like shutting down the US electrical grid, but he had been warned to not even try that. His leadership feared that if they succeeded in taking the country’s grid down, the Americans would retaliate and do the same to China. As much as he hated to admit it, China had grown just as dependent on electronics and the power grid as the US had. It was almost as if an unspoken mutually assured destruction (MAD) doctrine had been implemented between the warring factions. There were still areas that were off limits, even during a time of war. After President Gates nuked Shenyang, the Chinese leadership was hesitant to test him further by straying from the unofficial electronic détente.

Just as he was about to walk out of his office to check on one of his hacker teams, the building suddenly shook violently, throwing him to the ground. In a fraction of a second, he saw the ceiling above him collapse down on top of him and his fiefdom, just as a large fireball consumed them all. Unbeknownst to Colonel Xian and his hacker group, the National Security Agency had acquired their physical location and sent that data over to the Air Force and Navy. A B-2 bomber, who had been carrying out a strike against a rail bridge nearby, was redirected to drop a JDAM on the Agricultural Bank of China. Within seconds of the blast, a myriad of persistent cyber-attacks taking place across the US suddenly ceased.