War without Shadow - Operation Nitro Zeus and the Embryo of Cyber Weapons (circa 2010)

War without Shadow - Operation Nitro Zeus and the Embryo of Cyber Weapons (circa 2010)

Operation Nitro Zeus was an unprecedented cyber-attack plan secretly developed by the United States and Israel. The target was not limited to Iran's nuclear development facilities, but was conceived to simultaneously silence the nation's entire power grid, communications network, and air defense system.

Behind the attention paid to this operation was the exhaustion of the United States due to the Afghan and Iraq wars that continued into the 2000s. International pressure was mounting to deter Iran's nuclear development while avoiding a large-scale ground war. Israel had limited airstrikes, and the U.S. lacked public support. Under these circumstances, cyber weapons, which could paralyze the centers of enemy nations without inflicting casualties, were to revolutionize military thinking in the post-Cold War era.

Stuxnet," which was used in real life during the same period, is a symbol of this change. A highly sophisticated computer virus infiltrated the nuclear facilities at Natanz, Iran, and physically destroyed the centrifuges. This was the moment that showed the world that cyber attacks are not just about information theft, but can directly destroy industrial machinery and social infrastructure. Stuxnet employed an elaborate method of infiltrating factory systems via USB to rewrite control software. This technique is said to have supported the later expansion of the scale of "Operation Nitro Zeus.

Around 2010, the international community was shifting from the era of nuclear deterrence to the era of cyber deterrence. Diplomatic negotiations over Iran, and later the germ of the JCPOA (Iran Nuclear Agreement), were born out of this tension, but behind the scenes, a bloodless war had already begun on the "cyber battlefield.