Cyberwar? ... attaining one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the pinnacle of excellence. Subjugating the enemy’s army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence. ~ Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The  war is a violent continuation of interstates politics (according to von Clausewitz). The cyber war should enter the same paradigm.

From a legal perspective the international doctrine examined whether a cyber attack could be qualified as use of force (under article 2.5 of UNO charter) or as an armed attack (under article 51 of UNO charter). The criteria for considering a cyber attack as covered by above notions was the degree of physical destructiveness. A small degree of physical destruction will qualify a cyber attack under non military, international concepts like economic force, reprisals, international responsibility, etc.

This analysis seemed pertinent. It try to see the cyber warfare (form of interstate cyber attack) as an analogical extension of classical warfare. As such the cyber warfare would be another step within an unchanged framework.But the real evolution of cyber attacks by state actors shows the limits of this vision. No state is willing to escalate a cyber attack and produce the huge destruction that may trigger the classical forms of war or armed conflict. They will prefer to act unnoticed but pursuing their political aims with the new tool.

We can figure out even a more challenging. The question of destructiveness seems to be the core issue.  As such the main concept is ‘information (virtual) destructiveness’ that may relate to physical destructiveness in the same way that the 'intellectual property rights' relates to ordinary 'property rights'. Without dead and wounded, without casualties, this concept of ‘virtualized’ (invisible but not least severe) destruction might be an essential aspect of a cyber warfare undermining the base of a knowledge economy,  knowledge society or knowledge state. Finally we get a hint of cyber attacks as a cyber warfare (or cyber war) on itself , as a new genus,  and not as part of classical armed conflict paradigm.