Long before hackers targeted digital firewalls, ancient armies besieged stone ones. By employing siege warfare to capture cities and enemy strongholds that were too heavily fortified to assault directly, military commanders heeded the advice attributed to ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu in The Art of War: “The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.”
Modern cyber warriors may deploy malware and deepfakes instead of battering rams and catapults, but they still use the same winning tactics—including psychological warfare, breaching defenses, blockades and internal sabotage—once wielded by some of history’s greatest military commanders.
Psychological Warfare
'All warfare is based on deception.' —Sun Tzu
Psychological warfare employs intimidation, terror and deception to demoralize and manipulate an enemy. By distorting reality, psychological warfare undermines institutional trust and spreads confusion.
Ancient Warfare:
Few ancient warriors used terror and deception as effectively as Genghis Khan. The Mongol leader fooled enemies with battlefield feints and clever tricks such as instructing soldiers to light five campfires each to give the appearance of a much larger army. Living up to his bloodthirsty image, Genghis Khan ordered the slaughter of hundreds of thousands following the 1221 Siege of Merv, sparing only a few citizens to disseminate news of his brutality so that his next targets would surrender without fighting.
During the 1346 Siege of Caffa, the Mongols even catapulted the cadavers of Black Plague victims into the city to terrify the besieged population. “Infectious bodies were splattered throughout the city, and the psychological impact coupled with the sickness led to a quick surrender,” says Dr. Warren Doudle, senior lecturer on security and intelligence at Australia’s Edith Cowan University.
Cyber Warfare:
On modern digital battlefields, disinformation campaigns and social media deceptions turbo-charged by artificial intelligence blur lines between fact and fiction and erode trust in governments, the media and objective truth.
Deepfake videos that fabricate an alternate reality and attempt to trick observers into believing fictitious narratives are modern iterations of false flag operations advocated by Sun Tzu. For example, Doudle says a deepfake video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy telling his countrymen to surrender that circulated online weeks after Russia’s 2022 invasion was an attempt to sow confusion and mistrust in all video content.
Breaching Defenses
'In war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak.' –Sun Tzu
When brute force proved unsuccessful in breaking sieges, ancient armies sought to breach any weaknesses in enemy defenses. Similarly, hackers search for firewall vulnerabilities they can exploit to enter heavily guarded systems.