Does Russia really have the upper hand in cyberspace hacking? If not, they’ve got a pretty convincing bluff going on.
Read the Ted Koppel book, Lights Out, of a few years ago, and you’ll be convinced at the very least that when it comes to cyber-security and infrastructure, we are at risk. Koppel repeatedly illustrates the vulnerabilities of our electric grid. It’s a piecemeal job that is a century old in places, and its instability alone should raise eyebrows.
The grid, like so much of our critical “hard” infrastructure suffers from years of neglect. It is antiquated and at-capacity in most places. Could the Russian hackers—who give Vladimir Putin at least plausible deniability by being semi-detached from the Russian government—take down big chunks of our power grid? How about our water treatment plants?
Thus far, they’ve generally nibbled around the edges of our water and electric systems, preferring to wreak havoc on our hospitals and food supply. Recently, they launched their biggest assault to date by getting inside Kaseya’s computer network. Kaseya is a worldwide technology provider with customers from here to New Zealand and back. The hackers are demanding $70M in ransom to unlock computers belonging to hundreds of Kaseya’s customers. Their modus operandi continues to be disruption for cash, but something tells me that if we retaliate in any serious way, they’ll up the ante, perhaps escalating to something like air traffic control, shutting down air travel before water or power.
President Biden is supposed to have told Putin to keep his criminals in line lest we retaliate in meaningful ways, but we don’t know what that really means on either side of the equation: what hacking brings a response, and what proportional or even disproportional response can we offer?
I’ve asked around, but neither the military nor the civilian power and water sectors want to talk about it. In the parlance of poker, are we holding aces in the hole, or the worst possible 7-3 combo?
Russia has a rich past in literature and art, but technically—scientifically and militarily—they’ve managed to keep up with us mostly through particularly effective espionage. I guess if you’re going to lead the world in something, spying and stealing is a pretty good hedge against competitors: they do the work, you reap the benefits.
While we were reluctant allies in WWII, we shared the beginnings of the Manhattan Project with them. Some of our senior people, like Manhattan Project manager Edward Teller, thought that a fool’s errand, while others, like science leader Robert Oppenheimer, thought we should share. All the while we were sharing, they had moles at Los Alamos and the University of Chicago (where we built the first atomic pile in an effort to prove or disprove Einstein’s ideas about splitting the atom). They carefully checked their own intel against what we shared, and were not far behind when we exploded the first atomic bombs in 1945. Similarly, they relied on defected, captured, and coerced German scientists to mount their efforts in the space race. (According to Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff, the American spy community used to brag that our Germans were smarter the Russia’s Germans.)
After Korea and Vietnam, we discovered through various defections that their supersonic fighter capabilities that looked fearsome on paper, were less so in reality. They lacked our metallurgy and composite materials technologies, and while they had very fast aircraft, they were also very heavy, and lacked maneuverability and range.
Today, they have a one-note economy—the exportation of oil and natural gas. They don’t compete in the global manufacturing, automotive, pharmaceutical, aeronautical, or technology markets. The move to renewable energy sources is a frightening prospect at the Kremlin.
That means they don’t have any robust commercial targets, from which I infer any retaliatory cyber-attack that would get Putin’s attention would be on energy extraction or distribution—clearly an escalation, and a serious one at that.
Perhaps they have some municipal systems we could get at in a tit-for-tat manner, or maybe we still have some cards to play regarding their oligarch’s off-shore cash and real estate holdings. These are Putin’s friends and family, and hitting them in the pocketbook might be a strategic way of getting him to rein in his hackers.
The only thing that is certain is that he hates democracy and believes their Cold War loss was the most humiliating thing Russia has suffered since the Miracle on Ice at the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid.
Ever since coming to power, Putin has done everything he can to disrupt the West. He props up authoritarian regimes, and if you’re a friend of ours, you’re no friend of his. The question concerning their real abilities and our options remains open.
©Jon Sinton Progressive Agenda LLC