Russian grid is digital target of U.S.

WASHINGTON — The United States is stepping up digital incursions into Russia’s electric power grid in a warning to President Vladimir Putin and a demonstration of how the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively, current and former government officials said.

In interviews over the past three months, the officials described the previously unreported deployment of U.S. computer code inside Russia’s grid and other targets as a classified companion to more publicly discussed action directed at Moscow’s disinformation and hacking units around the 2018 midterm elections.

Advocates of the more aggressive strategy said it was long overdue, after years of public warnings from the Homeland Security Department and the FBI that Russia has inserted malware that could sabotage U.S. power plants, oil and gas pipelines or water supplies in any future conflict with the U.S.

But it also carries significant risk of escalating the daily digital Cold War between Washington and Moscow.

In a public appearance Tuesday, President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, said the U.S. was now taking a broader view of potential digital targets as part of an effort “to say to Russia, or anybody else that’s engaged in cyberoperations against us, ‘You will pay a price.’”

Since at least 2012, current and former officials say, the U.S. has put reconnaissance probes into the control systems of the Russian electric grid.

The action inside the grid appears to have been conducted under little-noticed new legal authorities, slipped into a military authorization bill passed by Congress last summer.

The bill granted U.S. Cyber Command, the arm of the Pentagon that runs the military’s offensive and defensive operations in the online world, the authority to conduct “clandestine military activity” in cyberspace, to “deter, safeguard or defend against attacks or malicious cyberactivities against the United States.”

Under the law, those actions can now be authorized by the defense secretary without special presidential approval.

“It has gotten far, far more aggressive over the past year,” one senior intelligence official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity but declining to discuss any specific classified programs. “We are doing things at a scale that we never contemplated a few years ago.”

The critical question — impossible to know without access to the classified details of the operation — is how deep into the Russian grid the U.S. has bored.

Both Gen. Paul Nakasone, the commander of Cyber Command, and Bolton, through spokesmen, declined to answer questions about the incursions into Russia’s grid. Officials at the National Security Council also declined to comment.

Two administration officials said they believed that Trump had not been briefed in detail about the steps to place “implants” — software code that can be used for surveillance or attack — inside the Russian grid.

Because the new law defines the actions in cyberspace as akin to traditional military activity on the ground, in the air or at sea, no such briefing would be necessary, they added.