Russia is at war with Europe.

before anyone jumps on the pedantry bandwagon, its worth noting that even though open war hasn’t been called: the attacks on infrastructure especially cyber warfare is extremely active and, crucially, direct.

It is totally fair to say that in a digital context, Russia is absolutely at war with Europe.

As far as I can tell, they don’t even try to hide it.

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RobotToaster 9 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The cold war never ended

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cookiengineer 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Some could say that in the cyber realm, they are not petty, ya! Well, or something like that.

Eversince notpetya and the colonial pipeline hack, the cyber strategy game changed a lot. Notpetya was genius as a deployment, because they abused the country's tax software deployment pipeline to cripple all (and I mean all, beyond 99%) businesses in one surgical strike.

The same is gonna happen to other tax software providers, because the DATEV AG and similar companies are pretty much the definition of digital incompetence wherever you look.

I could name other takedowns but the list would continue beyond a reasonable comment, especially with vendors like Hercules and Prophete that are now insolvent because they never prioritized cyber security at all, got hacked, didn't have backups, and ran out of money due to production plant costs.

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reactordev 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not to mention the information war they have been waging globally since 2016

	▲	naryJane 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		True, but they’ve certainly been doing it much longer than ten years. I’ll never forget this headline [0] that struck me as purely devilish, especially in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election. Combine that with the knowledge that Trump has been anti-NATO since the 1980s [1]. Who knows how long Russia has been nudging him along. Who knows how many avenues they traverse? Take for example the letter to Senator Tom Cotton about Greenland [2]. What an embarrassment. I can only hope we are equally successful in our own PsyOps. [0] https://www.rt.com/news/265399-putin-nato-europe-ukraine-ita... [1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ilanbenmeir/that-time-t... [2] https://monitoring.bbc.co.uk/product/c2018djo

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throw310822 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[flagged]

	▲	pjc50 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		They started this long ago, with the first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and a series of poisoning attacks all the way back to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvine...
	▲	bnjemian 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		This completely ignores that: 1. Russia was the aggressor in Ukraine, 2. Putin has made clear his desire to pursue expansionist goals through military action targeting prior members of the Soviet Union, 3. Putin regular threatens nuclear war with Ukraine, 4. Russia has shown outward hostility towards Western democracies and sought to manipulate elections with information warfare to reach their goals (most notably, 2016 US Election and Brexit), 5. Russian regularly cuts cables connecting countries, and 6. Though completely unrelated, Putin has a history of assassinating political opponents. That's wolfish behavior if I've ever seen it.
	▲	Zagitta 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You're conveniently omitting these all happened in response to the full scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. But thanks for proving the point about Russia's disinformation war.

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tosapple 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What I am starting to appreciate about these digital infrastructure attacks is that they may be reversible and or temporary. It can be a nice feature.

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jacquesm 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Then you're missing the point.

If they succeed they may well not be reversible. The question is if this had succeeded would we have shrugged it off again or responded appropriately?

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K0balt an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Can you give some examples of? I can imagine that under the right circumstances you might succeed in blowing up some transformers or even a turbine, but it seems like you’d be up to speed within a month or two on the outside? Or am I missing the gravity somehow?

	▲	applied_heat 5 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Transformers and turbines of any significance are not off the shelf parts and can have lead times of years
	▲	3eb7988a1663 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		A month or two without power does not seem like an enormous crisis? Stuxnet destroyed centrifuges. It does not seem impossible that a sophisticated attack could shred some critical equipment. During the Texas 2021 outage -they were incredibly close to losing the entire grid and being in a blackstart scenario. Estimates were that it could take weeks to bring back power - all this without any physical equipment destroyed or malicious code within the network.

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tosapple 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I wasn't commenting on any particular case. I was stating that flipping a switch is less costly to reverse than blowing up a dam.

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jacquesm 2 hours ago | parent [-]

These attacks are not at the level of 'flipping a switch'. If they succeed they can destabilize the grid and that has the potential to destroy gear, and while not as costly as blowing up a dam it can still be quite costly.

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tosapple 2 hours ago | parent [-]

During WW2 both germany and the UK as example were carpet bombed to assail industry, does that help you to understand my position better?

Vietnam too.

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shakna 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Not really.

If you succeed in attacking the grid, you achieve the same widespread industry impact, without the cost of the munitions.

It can take decades to recover from a cyber attack like this, if it succeeds.

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tosapple an hour ago | parent [-]

Again, not endoring any specific case just endorsing SPECIFICITY, COST, and "Collaterals".

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shakna an hour ago | parent [-]

I was not speaking to just one case. Today's incident, is _the norm_.

These attacks are widespread, damaging, and the repercussions are felt for decades in their wake. We _are_ being carpet bombed, and the costs for the victims are ongoing and growing. The collateral damage is everywhere.

Do you really think there's no impact?

> Cyber units from at least one nation state routinely try to explore and exploit Australia’s critical infrastructure networks, almost certainly mapping systems so they can lay down malware or maintain access in the future.

> We recently discovered one of those units targeting critical networks in the United States. ASIO worked closely with our American counterpart to evict the hackers and shut down their global accesses, including nodes here in Australia.

> https://www.intelligence.gov.au/news/asio-annual-threat-asse...

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tosapple an hour ago | parent [-]

You're an idiot, so am I for being drawn into this and having to re-itterate and clarify.

Did I say there's no impact?

	▲	idiotsecant 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		'I appreciate that these scammers are just stealing old people's money online instead of killing them and taking it'!

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rdtsc 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Does Europe overall feel and act like that’s the case though?

It seems as if the European war has been pushed to the background recently, and most people kind of forgot about it. If you walk down the streets of Paris or Berlin does it look like it’s wartime, do people talk about it much, do they share the latest front news and so on?

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joe_mamba 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>If you walk down the streets of Paris or Berlin does it look like it’s wartime,

Like what exactly would you want them to do? Run around screaming all day because there's a war in another country 2000 km away from them?

No, people just go on with their lives, doing their jobs, taking care of family and friends, paying their taxes, so that specialized workers in the ministry of defence can take care of the war stuff for them. That's how modern society works.

It's even similar in Kiev, when you walk down the streets you see people living their lives. Gyms, bars, cafes, clubs are full and lively. People don't stop living and enjoying their daily lives just because there's shelling somewhere else in the country.

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koiueo an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Kyiv.

And "enjoying their daily lives" diminishes real tragedies of Ukrainians' daily lives.

	▲	joe_mamba an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I beg to differ. Calling going out to a gym, cafe, club or a bar during wartime, as anything other than enjoying life, diminishes the real tragedy of those who are fighting on the front line and don't enjoy such leisure activities. Some people are fortunate enough that they can still get to enjoy life even if their country is in a war, as just like in every war ever, not everyone is affected equally.

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pocksuppet an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

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2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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TacticalCoder an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> If you walk down the streets of Paris or Berlin does it look like it’s wartime ...

Dunno about Berlin but walking in Paris as opposed to 20 years ago totally feels like an invasion happened and the country has been conquered. Same in Brussels. Same in several EU cities.

And I'm pretty sure Iran and the muslim brotherhood, and their allies from Russia, have something to do with it.

They're hard at work destabilizing the west and the left doesn't see what wrong with it: for example France just voted to classify the muslim brotherhood as the terrorist organization it is despite 100% of the french politicians at the left, all of them, voting against it.

We, literally, have left-wing politicians in the west encouraging islamism.

It's sickening.

	▲	RobotToaster 5 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It wasn't Iran that bombed Afghanistan, Libya, and Iraq[0]. Gadaffi warned that Libya was the only thing stopping most migrants reaching Europe. [0] at least recently
	▲	anonnon an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		In fairness, a large chunk of those immigrants to France were "Pied Noirs" and other diaspora from its former colonial possessions, e.g., Indochina.
	▲	anotherbadday an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Countless NGOs, in the past decades, pushed for mass migration to France, and called any opposing voice "nazis", the "darkest hours of our history", etc. We know the name of their leaders, their (ethno-religious) background, etc. They aren't Iranian. They aren't Muslim. They aren't Russian...

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redeeman 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

have you seen the competence in those who manage the infrastructure? i'd say i would need significant proof before assuming anything. And IF russia is doing it, I would still say that we should put 99% blame on the absolute incompetents running the infrastructure, 1% russia.

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jacquesm 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you did then you'd be extremely gullible.

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OKRainbowKid 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That seems like just victim blaming - "she was asking for it with the clothes she was wearing".

	▲	RobotToaster a minute ago \| parent [-]
		Software with vulnerabilities was defectively written. If someone makes tanks with paper for armour, because it cuts costs, they are to blame if those tanks catch fire.