Virtualni rat

In: Politicka misao, Band 37, Heft 1, S. 229-242

Abstract

Was Wesley Clark, NATO's commander-in-chief, right when he said that, instead of launching operation 'Allied Force' against it, the allies should have electronically isolated SR Yugoslavia? Yugoslav hackers & crackers used to good advantage the freedom of cyberspace. During NATO's intervention, they declared a real 'virtual war' to all the countries supportive of this campaign, particularly to the US. By swooping down by all available means on numerous official web pages of various American institutions & totally abusing the communicational freedoms on the Net, Yugoslav hackers in fact demonstrated a small part of the possibilities of the new e-force. However, the deleterious consequences of Yugoslav online users' activities were so harmful that they prodded the international community into issuing a blunt warning to the Serbian Telecom -- we shall switch you off from the Internet! The objective of this research is primarily to evidence a totally novel phenomenon on the Internet, the first organized virtual war taking place in cyberspace, at the time when a real military campaign was waged against SRY. One of the outcomes of these activities was 'striking out' the documents from the Net that had been preserved only in Mucalo & Svilicic's archive. There are no additional scientific resources, since the key sources for this article were the Internet & newspaper articles. Although envisaged as a medium available to all, the Internet must soon be safeguarded & protected by legal means. Otherwise, it might simply cave in under the onslaught of all abuses & innumerable viruses circulating the global cyberspace. Due to the increase in the number of users & services, it may be expected that soon a completely new branch of criminal law is to emerge -- computer crime. 2 Figures, 21 References. Adapted from the source document.