At the dangerous line. The US and Russia are on the verge of a major cyber war
The United States may launch a massive cyber attack against Russia in the coming weeks.
This was reported by a PolitNavigator correspondent , as reported by Kommersant, citing a publication in The New York Times.
It is noted that the US administration blames Moscow for hacking the systems of a number of American strategic ministries and departments and decided that sanctions are now not enough, and therefore it will be about “a series of covert actions against Russian networks, which will be obvious to the Russian leadership and intelligence services and the army, but not the outside world." It is stated that the American response will be made within three weeks.
The editor-in-chief of Arsenal of the Fatherland magazine, one of Russia's leading military experts, Viktor Murakhovsky, considers a US cyber attack to be quite likely
“Covert counterattacks are cyberattacks on public networks and related resources, carried out not directly from the centers of the US National Security Agency, but through so-called proxy servers. The targets of such attacks can be public resources and networks of private and public companies included in the intranet, which, unlike the public Internet, is a secure corporate network for the exchange of internal information.
As for the networks of the military and government administration system, which include objects of strategic importance, they do not have access to the public space and therefore cannot be attacked by proxy servers,” explains Murakhovsky.
He believes that the Americans may well try to carry out a covert cyber attack on the public sites of the Russian president or government, but similar attacks on military and government networks that are not part of the intranet are impossible.
According to the expert, to carry out this type of attack it is necessary to have your own agents inside Russian structures with the appropriate access codes.
The publication's interlocutor does not rule out that if a lot of money is invested in this area, then at a certain stage it will be possible to gain access to intranet servers and interfere with their work.
In turn, the newspaper believes that the leaks that appeared in The New York Times rather indicate an attempt to use the topic of cyber attacks as a psychological weapon, given that the United States is not yet ready to wage a full-scale cyber war with Russia.
“Russian structures responsible for cybersecurity work professionally, and in the event of American attempts to hack or block servers, a symmetrical response may follow. However, comparing resources and capabilities in this area is an extremely dangerous path that can lead to new destabilization,” concluded Murakhovsky.
In turn, Vasily Kashin, deputy director of the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, also confirmed that command and control systems for troops and complex weapons systems do not have a physical connection with the Internet and are reliably protected.
“More convenient targets are civilian management systems and especially postal services, office management systems of government departments and private companies. In general, the threat of escalation to the level of a full-fledged military-political crisis is small, but the very statements about retaliatory cyber attacks are a trend that cannot but cause alarm,” Kashin believes.
English version :: Read in English: On the brink of a major cyberwar. The US and Russia are on the brink of a major cyberwar.