{"id":89982,"date":"2020-10-27T06:46:17","date_gmt":"2020-10-27T11:46:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/?p=89982"},"modified":"2020-10-27T06:46:17","modified_gmt":"2020-10-27T11:46:17","slug":"auto-draft-284","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/2020\/10\/27\/auto-draft-284\/","title":{"rendered":"From Cold War to Gray War: Internet Conflict Intensifying"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"VOA \u2014 A former top security adviser to Boris Johnson has revealed that Britain has launched recently a series of covert cyber-based attacks on Russian leaders and their interests to \u201cimpose a price greater than one they might have expected\u201d for their cyber-offensive against the West.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

Other allied powers, including the U.S., are doing so, too, say Western intelligence officials in what is becoming a \u201clike-for-like\u201d cyber-conflict with the Kremlin in the so-called the \u201cgray space,\u201d the gap between normal state relations and armed conflict.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact you don\u2019t see that we use it doesn\u2019t mean we don\u2019t, because we wouldn\u2019t necessarily talk about those things,\u201d said Mark Sedwill, until recently Britain\u2019s top civil servant and national security adviser to Britain\u2019s Boris Johnson. But in an interview with The Times<\/em> newspaper, Sedwill underscored that Britain is using its cyber-offense capabilities to retaliate for Russian cyberattacks, information warfare and disruption campaigns.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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FILE – A still image taken from video shows Mark Sedwill, the top civil servant at Britain’s Home Office at the time. giving evidence at a Commons Home Affairs Select Committee hearing in London, July 8, 2014.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cWe seek to impose a price, usually a price greater than one they might have expected when we believe it is right and necessary,\u201d he said. \u201cWe can\u2019t leave the initiative to our adversaries,\u201d he added.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Britain has had an offensive cyber capability for more than decade and used it against the Islamic State, including targeting the terror group\u2019s low-tech drones in the Iraqi town of Mosul in 2018. But officials rarely discuss how they defend against or carry out hacking attacks \u2014 nor have they spelled out what they consider legitimate targets outside a full-scale declared war.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Last month, Gen. Patrick Sanders, who heads Britain strategic command, raised the veil a little, telling reporters that in theory Britain has the ability to \u201cdegrade, disrupt and even destroy critical capabilities and infrastructure of those who would do us harm, ranging from strategic to tactical targets.\u201d The British military partners with GCHQ, Britain\u2019s electronic intelligence agency.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sanders said: \u201cThe binary distinction between war and peace as we have approached it no longer applies.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

From the first time, Sedwill said Britain had used its cyber-offensive capabilities to retaliate for the 2018 novichok attack on Sergei Skripal, the former Russian double agent in the English city of Salisbury.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

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FILE – Police officers stand guard outside the home of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, Britain, March 8, 2018.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cAfter the Salisbury attack, first use of chemical weapons against a country in Europe in a century, we retaliated in visible ways. We expelled the entire Russian intelligence network in the UK,\u201d he said. \u201cBut we also took a series of other discreet measures including tackling some of the illicit money flows out of Russia, and covert measures as well, which obviously I can\u2019t talk about,\u201d he added.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sedwill\u2019s comments suggest Western powers are increasingly taking the gloves off in an intensifying \u201cgray war\u201d with Russia, as well as with Iran, China, and North Korea. \u201cIt is important that we are capable of maneuvering in the grey space, in that zone, and doing so effectively. We can\u2019t leave the initiative to our adversaries,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Last week, U.S. federal prosecutors unveiled indictments of six Russian military intelligence operatives for a series of cyber-attacks in an offensive spree aimed at undermining Western democracies by sowing confusion in everything from the 2016 U.S. presidential election to the South Korean Olympics in 2018. The indictments were the result of prolonged investigations by FBI analysts in cooperation with Google, Cisco, Facebook and Twitter as well with allied Western intelligence agencies, including Britain\u2019s.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"Picture<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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US Charges Six Russian Military Officers in Global Cyberattacks<\/div>\n
Officials say the cyber campaign represented \u2018the most disruptive and destructive series of computer attacks ever attributed to a single group\u2019<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n

The Russian cyber operations included launching attacks on the Ukrainian power system, impacting hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians in the middle of winter, Emmanuel Macron\u2019s presidential bid in France in 2017, and the British investigation into the 2018 Russian nerve agent attack in Salisbury, say U.S. prosecutors and British intelligence officials. They say Russian operatives working for the country\u2019s GRU military intelligence service sought to cast suspicion on other countries for carrying out the attacks.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

U.S. prosecutors say when it came to the South Korea Olympics the Russian hackers studied the tactics and techniques of their North Korean counterparts, so they could copy them and throw suspicion on Pyongyang.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, last week dismissed allegations about Russian hacking operations, telling a news briefing that the accusations were the product of someone with a \u201crich imagination.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s some kind of a diabolical perfume cocktail [of allegations],\u201d Zakharova told reporters.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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FILE – A general view shows the headquarters of the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, formerly known as the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), in Moscow, Russia, Oct. 4, 2018.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Thomas Rid, an American academic and author of the recently published book “Active Measure” said the level of detail in the indictment probably reflected the degree to which the GRU hacking operations had been infiltrated. \u201cThe Five Eyes intelligence communities, I would suspect, must have stunning visibility into Russian military intelligence operations if today\u2019s disclosures are considered dispensable,\u201d he tweeted after the indictments were made public.\u202f<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

VOA \u2014 A former top security adviser to Boris Johnson has revealed that Britain has launched recently a series of covert cyber-based attacks on Russian leaders and their interests to \u201cimpose a price greater than one they might have expected\u201d for their cyber-offensive against the West.\u202f\u00a0 Other allied powers, including the U.S., are doing so, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":89983,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latests"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"en","enabled_languages":["fa","en"],"languages":{"fa":{"title":true,"content":false,"excerpt":false},"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89982"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89982\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89985,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89982\/revisions\/89985"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}