Much as the air became militarily important in the World Wars and space became militarily important in the Energy Wars, cyberspace truly came into its own for the military during the Sharp Wars. Given that we are discussing an insurgency in one of the most developed nations of the time, which began in a region noted for its heavy concentration of tech companies and ultimately moved to one of its lunar colonies, the role of cyberspace should not come as a surprise.
Throughout the conflict, the control of information would be paramount, particularly because of the need by both sides to pull in the “silent majority” of people who were primarily interested in living their ordinary lives. However, as the conflict progressed and particularly when it extended to the Moon, cyberspace became a way to reach across the vast distances of space without risking one’s personnel to that unforgiving environment.
The most famous cyber-attack of the Sharp Wars is of course the malware attack on a number of landers at Slayton Field. However, there has been some ongoing debate on whether it was actually an operation of the Flannigan Admininstration, given that Grissom City was lunar tourism’s primary hub, and the settlement was under the command of a man in good favor with the Administration.
However, much more important if less spectacular was the continual effort to cut Shepardsport off from the Internet, generally by various kinds of Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks. By flooding the system with requests and overflowing the bandwidth of the connections between Shepardsport and the rest of the Internet, they hoped to prevent certain information from getting out.
For the Administration, this strategy was critical because Captain Waite had made the Constitutionality of Flannigan’s actions a central question from the time of the Kitty Hawk Massacre…
—- J Winthrop, “The Sharp Wars as an Information Age Insurgency.” Information Technology and History, Fall 2052.