Iran's Handala group, linked to Iranian Ministry of Intelligence, executed a wiper attack on US defense firm Stryker on March 11, 2026, using the company's own mobile device management infrastructure to detonate the payload from the inside. Reuters confirmed it. A wiper attack doesn't steal data, Artin. It destroys it. Permanently. That single operation tells you something the missile counts don't: this conflict has a second front, invisible and running continuously, and it may be more strategically durable than anything fired from a launch pad. While Lecture 4 covered the arms race math, Lecture 5 will delve into the cyber dimension, which compounds the asymmetry further. The Guardian tracked Iran-linked password-spraying attacks hitting over 300 Israeli Microsoft 365 organizations in coordinated waves on March 3rd, 13th, and 23rd, 2026. Deutsche Welle confirmed the same campaign routed through Tor nodes, targeting Israeli government and energy sectors specifically. Three waves. Thirty days. Hundreds of targets. That's not opportunistic hacking — that's a synchronized campaign timed to kinetic operations. AP News uncovered that Iran's Seedworm group deployed two new backdoors, Dindoor and Fakeset, against US and Israeli banks and NGOs, highlighting the preemptive nature of cyber operations in this conflict. The BBC then reported that a group called Marshtreader exploited vulnerabilities in Hikvision security cameras to harvest real-time strike intelligence from Israel and Gulf states after the opening strikes. And the NYT confirmed Iran-linked actors compromised 50 Israeli public cameras — a direct mirror of Israel's own February 28th camera hacks inside Iran. Artin, that's not coincidence. That's tit-for-tat digital warfare running in parallel with every kinetic exchange. Here's what makes cyber operations structurally different from missiles. A ballistic missile is detected the moment it launches. A backdoor like Fakeset can sit dormant inside a bank's network for months before activation, invisible to defenders, harvesting credentials and mapping internal systems. AFP confirmed that despite Iran imposing a domestic internet blackout after Israeli strikes, TA453 — a known Iranian phishing group — successfully compromised a US think tank on March 8th, 2026, using overseas infrastructure to bypass the blackout entirely. Shutting down your own internet doesn't stop your offensive cyber units. It just inconveniences your population. The synthesis, Artin, is this: cyber-attacks on infrastructure and high-level intelligence penetrations are not supporting actors in this conflict — they are co-equal weapons. Wiper attacks erase institutional memory. Camera compromises feed targeting data to missile crews in real time. Password-spraying campaigns degrade the command-and-control networks that coordinate air defenses. Every kinetic strike in this conflict is preceded and enabled by cyber operations, illustrating the critical role of digital warfare in modern military strategy. The missile you see is the product of the hack you never heard about. That is why analysts increasingly argue cyber warfare doesn't replace traditional conflict here — it makes traditional conflict more lethal, more precise, and far harder to deter.