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215 Manuel R. Torres Soriano Proxy wars in cyberspace events, to thus strengthen its dissuasive character before potential enemies. On the contrary, the use of a cyber weapon reveals the advantage possessed by the actor using it, which causes the potential victims to correct those vulnerabilities and take active measures to avoid an identical cyber attack. This leads the antagonists to ration the use of their cyber arsenals, making use of them only in contexts where no other viable alternative exists, or even renouncing their present use so as to have them available in a potential conflict of greater importance. This restraint may be observed even in actors with a greater predisposition for the use of force. It is highly significant that in the conflict between Russia and the Ukraine, hardly any major cyber attacks were produced beyond the usual attacks of denial of service and the sabotage of web pages on the part of patriotic cyber militias and hacker groups7. The Russian annexation of part of the Ukrainian territory and its attempt to destabilize the Kiev regime have been interpreted as a crystal-clear example of so-called “hybrid warfare”, where the attacker makes intensive use of those resources of force which allow him to diffuse his responsibility during the development of the conflict. In spite of recourse to cyberspace fitting perfectly into the strategy of concealment, in the Russian case the fear of undesirable effects weighed more than the advantages its use could provide8. In the words of a member of U.S. intelligence, the problem with using a cyber weapon is that “once it’s been revealed, it’s the same as using an invisible airplane for the first time, you’ve rung the bell, and you can’t maintain that the plane no longer exists. The question is: which aerial battle do you really want to use your invisible plane in?”9 One of the most established myths about cyber conflict is the supposed technical impossibility of establishing the origin of an attack, which would have spurred the aggression of a great number of actors sheltered by the anonymity provided by cyberspace. The reality is that although technically it is complex to determine the authorship of a cyber attack, it is not an impossible task10. In fact, the forensic aspect is not a determinant element; at times, it is not even the principal one. The reaction against the attacker follows a political logic11, and as such, makes it unlikely that the aggressor will go unpunished due to lack of reliable proof of his guilt, as would 7  LIBIKI, Martin, “The Cyber War that Wasn’t”, in GEERS, Kenneth (ed.)”Cyber War in Perspective: Russian Aggression against Ukraine”, Tallin: NATO CCD COE Publications, 2015. https://ccdcoe. org/sites/default/files/multimedia/pdf/CyberWarinPerspective full book.pdf. 8  VALERIANO, Brandon G., and MANESS, Ryan, “Cyber wars versus Cyber Realities.” “Cyber Conflict in the International System”, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 9  KETTER, Kim. “Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon”, Random House, New York, 2014. 10  GUITTON, Clement and KORZAK, Elaine, “The Sophistication Criterion for Attribution: Identifying the Perpetrators of Cyber-Attacks”, The RUSI Journal, vol. 158, nº 4 (2013), pp. 62-68. 11  GOMPERT, David C. and LIBICKI, Martin, “Waging Cyber War the American Way”, Survival Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 57, nº 4 (August-September 2015), pp. 7-28. http://revista.ieee.es/index.php/ieee

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