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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cookiengineer 2 hours ago | parent | 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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RobotToaster 12 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The cold war never ended

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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?

	▲	3eb7988a1663 an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	applied_heat 8 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Transformers and turbines of any significance are not off the shelf parts and can have lead times of years

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