At what point does a cyberattack become an act of war?
My question is prompted by last week's news that a highly sophisticated malware program called Mask has spent the last six years stealing valuable intelligence from supposedly secure government and diplomatic computers around the world.
Researchers are certain that Mask itself was produced by a government. Intrusions by one country into the networks of another have become so common that it's reasonable to wonder whether all this cyberwarfare is warfare. The time to think about this is now, when these battles are still in their adolescence. Because how we fire back will depend in part on whether we think we're at war.