The U.S. has shown Russia its hand, and that’s no way to win a cyber war.
COMMENT
The Obama admini stration seems to have a penchant for broadcasting its plans to the world before putting them into action. But telling your opponents what your next move will be is a bad idea. Whether in football, the board game Risk or the real world, a strategy should surprise them and keep them off balance. If your adversaries know you are coming, they can react faster, deploy pre- emptive countermeasures and ultimately blunt the impact of whatever it is you plan on doing.
Since the Democratic National Committee’s email servers were hacked in the lead- up to the Democratic convention and allegations began swirling about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempts to disrupt the American election through cyber- attacks on American soil, the Obama administration has been vocal about how it plans to deal with the situation.
We now know that the U. S. has proposed a proportional counterattack: Central Intelligence Agency Sources reportedly noted that the administration had asked the intelligence agency to prepare a “clandestine” cyberattack that aims to “embarrass” the Russians. VicePresident Joe Biden said on Meet the Press that the U. S. is intent on “sending a message” to Putin.
Of course, while the U. S. seems to have lost its strategic advantage here, its actual tactics may still be in the works behind closed doors, assuming it hasn’t already initiated some kind of retaliation. But there’s no question that it has blown the element of surprise.
Everything we have been hearing suggests that the Americans will try to embarrass Putin by responding with a hack of their own. Needless to say, the obvious next step for the Russians would be to go into information- control mode. If there are embarrassing emails on servers under Russian control, rest assured they have been expunged or stowed carefully away.
The popular i dea that everything stays on the Internet forever is not quite true. For your average person, what you say, type or send online is pretty well permanent, but if you are a Russian oligarch, or even Putin himself, keeping your most embarrassing content away from prying eyes is more than possible.
As the events surroundi ng Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails makes clear, if you control the server, you control the content of that server ( although the recipient of the email could still have a record, of course). The trouble is that Russia often does control the servers, as it has a data localization law on the books that requires data generated by Russian citizens be stored within Russia’s borders.
Thus, t he Americans would have to gather the data before the Russians have had a chance to delete it. But since the administration has already shown its hand, that scenario seems less likely. Of course, the U.S. could try to show how Putin and other oligarchs are exporting money and otherwise engaging in corrupt practices, as was recently suggested by retired Adm. James Stavridis. Since a lot of the proof would be stored outside of Russia, the option seems initially plausible, but comes with its own set of problems.
First, to embarrass members of the Russian government in this way would require that the U.S. hack — or, ideally, secure lawful access to — third- party servers, to gain access to the necessary data. Furthermore, for U. S. intelligence agencies to access Russia’s computers, it is helpful if they are connected to the outside world. But, even back in October 2015, Russia was reportedly testing ways to sever the link between the Russian portion of the Internet and the rest of the network.
As Nikolay Nikiforov, the Russian communications minister, said, “Our task is to do what is needed so that the Russian Internet will carry on working independently of the opinion of colleagues, whatever sanctions policy decisions they decide to take.”
In other words, the U. S. might be able to disrupt Russia at the margins ( and I have no doubt the U. S. has the skills and the technology to do so), but the Russians also have a last- ditch kill switch that could be used to keep the Russian networks running, and free from any foreign countermeasures. What’s more, they can just blame the disruption on the U. S. and win points domestically.
In the end, the cat is out of the bag. Russia now knows that it is likely facing an imminent cyber-attack, and the U. S. cannot back down, waver or change course.
IN A VERY REAL SENSE, THE PASSAGE OF TIME CHANGES NOTHING. — ROBSON IT IS BAD STRATEGY FOR THE AMERICANS TO HAVE SHOWN THEIR HAND TO THE RUSSIANS BEFORE ACTING.