CIA gets Trump's blessing for cyber war against Russia
Last week, several major American media published news: two years ago, the “pro-Russian” US President Trump signed a secret decree expanding the powers of the CIA to conduct offensive cyber operations abroad. According to press reports, over the past two years the main US spy agency has carried out more than a dozen such operations.
Data with reference to former employees of the Trump apparatus were published by the electronic publication Yahoo News, and last weekend they were confirmed by Donald Trump personally in an interview with the conservative newspaper The Washington Post.
The softest part is that Trump, by his decree, canceled Directive No. 20 of his predecessor Barack Obama, which obliged the CIA to coordinate with the leadership of the state the conduct of cyber attacks against other states.
Trump's decree also gives specific instructions to carry out active offensive actions in cyberspace against the main opponents of the United States - Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and Venezuela.
We are not talking about some kind of hacker attacks with the aim of stealing a hundred or two thousand dollars, hacking the accounts of major politicians on social networks, digging up incriminating evidence in emails, or cleaning up some data on servers. Although this is also welcome.
The CIA is focused on causing large-scale harm to states that America does not like: attacks on power grids, attacks on the enemy’s key infrastructure. For example, causing failures and shutdowns of equipment of oil and gas industry enterprises, activating “bugs” in the equipment of industrial enterprises, and interfering with leading state media.
In particular, Trump openly admitted that two years ago he personally authorized an Internet attack on the Russian Federal News Agency.
Interestingly, two years ago, The New York Times published an article reporting on attempts by American intelligence agencies to introduce malicious codes into the equipment of the Russian energy system.
In response, Trump became very angry, calling the information “untrue” and “treason against a once great newspaper.”
As has already become known, not only the FAN news agency was subjected to a cyber attack by the CIA. In July 2019, overseas cyber saboteurs managed to hack into the network of the Moscow IT company Saytek, which carries out contracts for Russian intelligence services and government departments, gaining access to a volume of documents of 7,5 terabytes and twenty closed projects. The attackers leaked some of the data about the company’s projects to journalists and the hacker group Digital Revolution, which in 2018 hacked the server of the Kvant Research Institute, which works closely with the FSB.
In 2019, similar CIA attacks caused serious damage to Iran's security.
Thus, an anonymous hacker group managed to hack into the network of Iran’s cyber forces and post comprehensive personal data of their employees on Telegram.
In November 2019, data on 15 million debit cards of clients of three Iranian banks was leaked to Telegram, which, according to experts, indirectly confirms the increased activity of the CIA cyber troops.
It is noteworthy that senior officials from the Obama administration spoke out strongly against attacks on the banking systems of other countries, rightly pointing out that such actions undermine the already unstable global financial system, as well as the fact that the US financial system could be subject to retaliatory damage.
But, as you can see, the poorly educated and conspiracy-minded businessman Trump is little concerned about these circumstances, since America must be “on top of us” at any cost.
A number of American sources claim that the CIA’s aggressive actions against Russia in cyberspace were a response to unconfirmed attacks by “Russian hackers” on the American election system that allegedly took place in 2016.
Currently, the GosSOPKA system is in operation in Russia and is constantly being improved, aimed at detecting, preventing and eliminating the consequences of cyber attacks.
According to Nikolai Murashov, deputy director of the National Coordination Center for Computer Incidents, the GosSOPKA system in 2017 prevented 2,4 billion attempts to hack into computer networks of critical Russian infrastructure facilities, and in 2018 it prevented over 4 billion such attempts.
From this wave of cyber attacks, Murashov identifies 12,5 and 17 thousand, respectively, as the most dangerous attempts to have a harmful impact on the networks of infrastructure facilities.
Venezuela, which does not have such a digital shield, turned out to be vulnerable to electronic attacks from outside, as a result of which 2019% of the country lost power in 90. According to the Minister of Information of the Republic, Jorge Rodriguez, the cause of the blackout was a cyber attack from the United States on the automated control system of the Guria hydroelectric power station.
Former NSA agent Snowden, who received asylum in Russia, has repeatedly informed the public about US digital sabotage against vulnerable infrastructure facilities in Hong Kong, mainland China and even North Korean defense facilities, despite the fact that the international community has agreed that these facilities are untouchable from cyber attacks.
Returning to Russia, experts note that such Western IT monsters as Symantec, Check Point and many others have been forced out of the sphere of digital protection of critical objects, although they also note the absolute dependence of Russian corporate and personal users on the United States in operational and office programs. and also, unfortunately, in software for automated control systems for production and technological processes associated with wild privatization processes and the choice of new “effective owners” exclusively in favor of “advanced Western technologies.”
Cyber security experts warn that many technological chains within Russia can be stopped through the activation of “bookmarks” in the software and hardware of imported equipment.
Rusnet, which also relies on Western technologies, is doing better after the measures taken under the Sustainable Internet Law, since the Internet has long become an important infrastructure for Russia.
According to experts, despite the protesting cries of children and the liberal intelligentsia, who stirred up passions around the “isolation of the Russian Internet according to Chinese principles,” Russia is currently capable of building its own stable network if Washington still decides to turn off the corresponding switch.
In general, according to observers, Russia is gradually gaining stable protection against digital attacks from the outside, and the process of import substitution in the domestic IT industry is occurring at an accelerated pace, although, of course, there remain gaps and nuances that our unprincipled and treacherous “Western partners” will try to detect and penetrate "
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