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TNNI: You recently authored a book called Inside Cyber Warfare. Tell us a little about the book. What was your motivation for writing it?

Carr: What I tried to do with the book was take a more complex view of the scope of cyber warfare and really even the misnomer of cyber warfare, because there really isn’t any legal definition as such. There is a cyber component to an actual act of war, but in terms of a battle in cyberspace, we have not really seen that and there is no real definition to that. Instead, the book looks at the various ways that state and non-state actors interact in cyberspace, in order to exercise control or to commit crime or do espionage or any number of actions that network systems now enable actors to do.

TNNI: One of the areas that you just touched on was defining cyber war. Do you think we will ever reach a point where there is a commonly accepted definition, particularly in the international realm?

Carr: Probably. I imagine in time such a thing will occur, it is going to take an awful long time. The biggest problem is that the existing models of what treaties do is something that might not work for cyberspace, and I touch on this in the book.

In my view it is more of a law enforcement issue rather than an issue that can be prescribed through a treaty regime similar to way that Weapons of Mass Destruction are controlled. I think those treaties will just not be effective for cyberspace. However, I do hope that one day the principal nations will agree on the principals of a collaborative law enforcement effort to crackdown on abuses that are committed in that plane.

TNNI: Do you find cyber attacks to be a predominately the work of nation-sates or do you also see this as a proliferation of nationalist hackers, and who do you think poses the greater threat?

Carr: I don’t think hackers are going to waste time with anything that does not yield some type of profit. So then it really becomes the question of what was targeted. That is how Grey Logic looks at attribution when it comes to cyber espionage; what have we tied it to what was taken, who would have reason to have entered or accessed it; it has value to what party? Then you can start narrowing the field.