Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia is making the necessary efforts to protect against cyber attacks. The Russian leader said this on June 20 in the course of a traditional straight line with citizens of the Russian Federation, answering a question about the publication in the American newspaper The New York Times devoted to the cyber attacks of the US military against the Russian energy infrastructure.
“We must somehow react to this, understand what is at stake,” the Russian president said.
According to him, Moscow has repeatedly offered Washington to start a dialogue to develop any rules in cyberspace, "but so far I have not received any intelligible answer."
“Regarding the work of our critical infrastructure, energy, other areas, of course, we need to think about how to protect ourselves from any cyber attacks and any negative impact. We are not only thinking about it, but also doing it, ”said Vladimir Putin.
Earlier, Deputy Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, Yuri Kokov, said on June 19 that the danger from the use of cyber weapons was comparable to the effects of the use of weapons of mass destruction. He said this during an international meeting of high representatives responsible for security issues in Ufa.
“The era of technological and digital terrorism is coming, which in terms of the scale of the consequences in the near future can be comparable to weapons of mass destruction,” Kokov emphasized.
According to him, one of the threats of a new type is the danger of the intervention of terrorists in the work of automated control systems of critical objects for the country.
The statement by the Security Council Deputy Secretary was made against the background of the discussion in the world press of the New York Times newspaper report on cyber operations by the US military against the Russian energy infrastructure. Allegedly, the malware used by the US military is capable of collecting information about the functioning of the Russian power system, as well as being used to commit cyber attacks.
“Such statements about cyber attacks are, in fact, a recognition that America is at war with us, because cyber war is also war,” said Russian businessman and IT expert, CEO of Ashmanov and Partners, in a conversation with RT Igor Ashmanov.
Power of darkness
The main goal of potential US cyber attacks is to destabilize the internal situation of the rival states, Alexander Brazhnikov, head of the non-commercial partnership Union of Information Protectors, said in an interview with RT.
“The attack on power systems is one of the most effective ways. Blackout or power outages can cause enormous damage to the economy and even cause a social explosion, ”the expert explained.
In turn, the head of the Center for the Study of Public Applications of National Security Alexander Zhilin noted that cyber attacks against power systems can lead to difficulties in the work of all city services, including water pipes and sewage treatment plants and, as an example of Argentina’s recent energy accident shows, affect tens of millions of people .
“If communications are disabled, for example, the population will be left completely without water, on the third day all puddles will be drunk. And on the fourth, babies will begin to die, then old men and women, ”Zhilin said in an interview with RT.
According to Zhilin, the strategy of destroying the infrastructure is “typical of the Anglo-Saxons” and their allies, which is why Ukrainian security forces constantly bombard the sewage treatment system in the Donbas.
“It’s no secret that American cyber warfare is involved in the widespread outage of electricity in Venezuela (March 2019 - RT ),” said American speaker, corresponding member of the Academy of Military Sciences Sergey Sudakov, in a conversation with RT. - If you do not protect your energy facilities, then entire neighborhoods and cities, even countries, can be de-energized. This means that you can lose a huge number of people, for example, those who are connected to life support devices in hospitals. ”
"The real hot war"
According to Alexander Brazhnikov, hacking equipment at nuclear power plants, hydropower plants and thermal power plants threatens to have very serious consequences. It is possible that such sabotage could potentially lead to large-scale man-made disasters.
“A nuclear power plant, at least for a while, will lose the ability to regulate processes in a nuclear reactor, hydroelectric power plants - the volume of water,” emphasizes Brazhnikov.
In the first case, according to the expert, there will be a danger of an explosion in the power unit and radioactive contamination of the territory. An accident at a hydroelectric station can lead to the destruction of the station and the death of at least its personnel.
“If the CHP plant is attacked, the temperature of the water in the pipes can get out of control,” the expert notes.
This, in his opinion, threatens with accidents on the heating network and the termination of the power supply to the house.
According to Alexander Zhilin, cybertataki can also affect gas supplies, which is extremely dangerous for Russia with its harsh winter.
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"If you disable this infrastructure, people will simply die," - says the expert.
According to Sergei Sudakov, using cyber weapons, “America may try to plunge other countries into chaos”, disrupting the work of payment systems, airports, enterprises using automated systems, and all vital infrastructure.
In turn, political analyst Leonid Savin, director of the Fund for Monitoring and Forecasting, said in a conversation with RT that, depending on the virus used, as a result of a cyber attack, “billions of rubles could be damaged: the servers in banks were disabled, some large objects were de-energized Airplanes, especially those manufactured in the United States, may begin to fall. ”
“We are talking about weapons that are more dangerous than nuclear weapons,” says Alexander Zhilin. “In the conditions of modern highly-urbanized societies, we cannot do without communication, neither light nor gas supply.”
According to Sergei Sudakov, one of the main tasks of the American cyber war is “to get to the military infrastructure of Russia by any means” in order to disable it, but “at this stage it is not feasible for them.”
In turn, Igor Ashmanov notes that large-scale cyber attacks on infrastructure facilities could mean the beginning of a large-scale military conflict.
“The cyber attack on critical infrastructure facilities is part of a hot war,” the expert believes. “So if the Americans start attacking our infrastructure, they will have to worry about whether their missiles took off and what time they have.” It will be a real hot war. ”
Also, experts note that in the hands of American intelligence services are tools that allow you to pass off your attack as someone else’s, which can be used both to entangle traces and to create false reasons for attacks on the enemy’s infrastructure. In particular, in 2017, the existence of such programs was reported by Wikileaks.
“This is a new type of weapon, it is difficult to track where the attack itself comes from, you can use such exploits that are loaded into the system, are located there for many months or years, and then activated. You can create the illusion that the attack occurred from another state or even within Russia. In general, the methods are quite sophisticated, and the legal field is rather vague, ”emphasizes Leonid Savin.
Frank confessions
The sensational publication of The New York Times came out on June 15 and provoked a reaction in the upper echelons of power in both Russia and the United States. US President Donald Trump called the publication false and accused journalists of treason.
In turn, a spokesman for the Russian president, Dmitry Peskov, noted that if some American departments do engage in such activities without the President’s knowledge, this indicates "a hypothetical possibility ... of all signs of cyberwar, cyberwar actions against Russia." According to Peskov, “strategic, vital areas of the economy (Russia - RT ) have repeatedly been and are being subjected to cyber attacks from abroad,” and the United States, despite President Vladimir Putin’s proposals, is in no hurry to respond to proposals for jointly countering cybercrime.
Later, the head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergey Naryshkin, said that the Russian special services were aware of the plans of Western countries to attack Russian infrastructure in cyberspace.
The Russian Ministry of Energy told reporters that “the majority of critical energy subjects are connected to the state protection system” against cyber attacks.
As previously noted by the Russian media with reference to the deputy director of the National Computer Incident Coordination Center (NCCD), Nikolai Murashov, in 2018 more than 4 billion attacks on the Russian critical information infrastructure were recorded. Among the countries that are sources of threats to Russia's information security, according to NCCI, the main role is played by the United States.
The American media do not report on actions in the Internet space against Russia for the first time. For example, in February of this year, The Washington Post announced, citing its sources, about the successful cybertack of the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the Cyber Command of the Armed Forces against the Internet Investigation Agency based in St. Petersburg, which the United States suspected of interfering with the presidential election. 2016 The American security forces did not officially take responsibility for the cyber attack, but did not deny it.
“It seems to me that it is common for all security services not to extend their work, so the general public is not very aware. Therefore, we don’t really imagine how far this could go, ”American expert in the field of Internet technologies Roger Kay commented in an interview with RT about possible US cyber attacks against Russia.
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On June 11, presidential adviser on national security issues, John Bolton, announced plans to expand “offensive operations” in cyberspace.
According to experts, Washington has an impressive experience in conducting such operations. In particular, in 2017, The New York Times noted that since 2014, the United States conducted cyber attacks against North Korea. In particular, sabotage was carried out on North Korean defense sites.
In turn, former NSA employee Edward Snowden previously reported that the United States conducted mass hacking of computer networks in Hong Kong and mainland China.
Also, according to The New York Times, the United States previously used cyber weapons against Iran. In particular, Washington is credited with using the Stuxnet virus to attack Iran’s nuclear centrifuges in 2009-2010.
More independence
Although critically important Russian infrastructure facilities are disconnected from the worldwide network, this is not a panacea for the harmful actions of American hackers, Leonid Savin notes. Moreover, the attacks can touch the most different objects of the Russian economy.
“There are serious risks, since we use quite a lot of equipment produced in the West,” said Savin, stressing that vulnerabilities could be left in Western software, which would then be used by foreign intelligence services.
Igor Ashmanov noted that the dependence of Russian companies on foreign suppliers in the information sphere harms the security of the country.
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“We have a large part of the critical infrastructure and large industrial productions working on Western software, which constantly downloads updates and is managed from the cloud, and the update is somewhere abroad, and this is the main problem,” said RT Ashmanov. - Cyberterrorist is not needed for what you can simply turn off the switch. We need to ensure import substitution, especially in the industrial, energy and transport areas. ”
Earlier in the Russian Ministry of Communications, as reported by the TASS news agency, stated that “the use of domestic intellectual accounting systems, telecommunications equipment, component base and secure protocols” in the energy sector can be “insurance” against hackers.
“The Russian leadership is well aware of the danger of hacking into strategic facilities, including power grids,” notes Alexander Brazhnikov. - As far as I can tell, there is a duplicate system at domestic power stations, which allows you to manage processes in manual mode. It is necessary in the event that automated systems are disabled. At the same time, energy infrastructure in the West relies more on digital technologies. Machines almost completely ousted man. On the one hand, it increases productivity, reduces operating costs. But on the other hand, it is difficult to say whether the staff in the US and the EU will cope with an emergency. In this regard, Russia can be called a more protected country. ”
Retaliatory move
On June 20, the presidential envoy for international cooperation in the field of information security, Andrei Krutskikh, said that Russia was seeking to reach an agreement on the “rules of the game” in cyberspace with the United States. As Dmitry Peskov noted earlier, “it was President Putin, it was the Russian side who repeatedly tried to initiate international cooperation in order to jointly counteract any manifestations of cybercrime. However, according to the press secretary of the Russian president, “American partners never responded to these proposals.”
According to Leonid Savin, even without the participation of the United States, such mechanisms are necessary. At a minimum, they can become an instrument of international pressure on the United States not wanting to recognize any rules in cyberspace.
“It is important to lobby for the adoption of international legal norms in order to criminalize such actions against not only Russia, but also other states,” says Savin.
According to the Wired edition, many American analysts consider the Trump administration’s approach to offensive operations in the cybersphere too dangerous. They fear that in the event of an attack on the Russian infrastructure as a result of the response of our country, the United States may suffer much more.
According to Alexander Zhilin, the attitude of the United States to the use of cyber weapons is comparable to how they behaved after they became possessors of nuclear weapons. As long as Washington had the advantage, in this sphere he could use atomic bombs (against Japan) and develop plans for nuclear strikes on the USSR. However, after the Soviet Union acquired its own nuclear weapons and began building up its arsenal, it was the prospect of a proportionate response that caused Washington not to use these weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, the Americans even went for the creation of bilateral mechanisms to control strategic armaments.
According to the expert, in order to force the US to negotiate and prevent the use of cyber-weapons against Russia, it is necessary to improve both the system of defense against attacks and the offensive potential in this area.
“It is necessary for our potential adversary to understand that in any case he will receive such an answer that will nullify all his hopes of victory,” Zhilin said. “This answer will be overwhelming.”