For example, Russia launched cyber attacks on the government websites of Georgia in 2008, a move which coincided with military operations in the breakaway province of South Ossetia. An innovation strategy which fosters a culture of technological entrepreneurship would be more promising.Ĭyber attacks can also be politically motivated. In this context, the US should respond by convincing China that stealing foreign secrets would only lessen the ability and desire of Chinese firms to develop their innovative capabilities. China’s cyber espionage, for example, is part of a larger effort to reduce its dependence on foreign technology and to move from ‘made in’ to ‘innovated in’ China. For one, online crime and espionage can often be economically motivated. Is this focus justified? Treating cyberspace as a battlefield confuses the symptom for the cause and misses a larger point: that the roots of cyber attacks lie elsewhere.

More recently, Chinese military thinkers also called for an ‘all-society’ approach to cyber-war mobilisation, involving civilian, industrial and military networks. Meanwhile, China confirmed for the first time in May 2011 the existence of a cyber-focused Blue Army within the People’s Liberation Army. Notably, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta likened the potential consequences of an all-encompassing cyber attack to the ‘next Pearl Harbor’. And when the White House released its first International Strategy for Cyberspace in May 2011, it was closely followed by the Department of Defense’s Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace. In May 2010, for example, the US Cyber Command was formed. This Cold War mindset is slowly leading national governments to focus on ‘cyber warfare’ and ‘cyber sovereignty’.

It appeared a reasonable suggestion when, two months later, the lower house of Japan’s Diet also fell victim to cyber attacks, reportedly from China. In August 2010, after Japanese firm Mitsubishi Heavy Industries became the subject of cyber attacks from China, one commentator in the Financial Times suggested that cyber threats might provide new common ground to re-energise the traditional military security alliance between the US and Japan. “I will say that, over the last several years, the US has made positive significant strides in reducing the size of the Russian intelligence officer footprint in the United States, kicking them out, in effect,” Wray said.Economics, Politics and Public Policy in East Asia and the PacificĪ recent Bloomberg report declared the China-based hacking of hundreds of US companies a ‘cyber Cold War’. Last year, a Dutch intelligence agency publicly identified a Russian military intelligence officer who had studied at the prestigious Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, an elite graduate program favored by US military personnel, young diplomats and future spies. Russia employs not only “traditional intelligence officers” but also cut-outs, Wray said on Thursday, citing a Mexican national arrested by US authorities in 2020 and accused of assisting Russian intelligence. The US in 2018 expelled 60 Russian diplomats whom the US identified as intelligence agents, as well as ordering the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle, as part of its response to Russia’s alleged use of a nerve agent to poison a former Russian spy living in the United Kingdom. But as US officials have increasingly recognized Russia under President Vladimir Putin as an adversary, traditional counterintelligence concerns once thought of as Cold War relics – human spies operating on US soil rather than cyber spies acting from inside of Russia – have once again drawn top level attention. The threat of Russian spies operating on US soil is nothing new. “The Russian intelligence footprint, and by that I mean intelligence officers, is still way too big in the United States and something we are constantly bumping up against and trying to block and prevent and disrupt in every way we can.” “The Russian traditional counterintelligence threat continues to loom large,” Wray said during public remarks at the Spy Museum in Washington. FBI Director Christopher Wray warned Thursday that the number of Russian spies operating inside the United States is “still way too big,” despite efforts to kick them out.

Cyber espionage 2012