This week’s Russian invasion of Ukraine has not yet, as far as we know, involved a major cyberattack. But the Crimean precedent, combined with Putin’s threats against anyone who might intervene, has made cyberwar a global issue. Proximity doesn’t matter. At any time, at least in theory, your bank accounts, your power, your waterworks, and everything else might seize up. The result could be catastrophic.

In 1993, Arquilla and Ronfeldt’s prediction of a “transformation in the nature of war” might have seemed a step too far. The prior transformation in the nature of war had developed from the deliberate, planned accrual of nuclear weapons by a select few superpowers: an active buildup of strategic arsenals. The threat of cyberwar, by contrast, has more to do with a global stockpile of vulnerabilities, amassed by accident as a by-product of continued innovations in connectivity. In the end, the sensation is the same: a foreboding feeling of pervasive, imminent risk. Cyberwar is real.

Suggested countermeasures, both for netwar and for cyberwar, have lately made the rounds. We’ve been advised to slow our news sharing and consumption: Stop, investigate the source, find better coverage, and trace claims, the misinformation researcher Mike Caulfield suggests in a model he calls SIFT. At the same time, IT departments are issuing reminders to keep our systems up-to-date and watch out for phishing emails. But these individual and local efforts go only so far. A single, introspective social-media clicker can’t do much to slow the spread of lies, and even wised-up employees can’t plug the security holes created by connected gadgets.