I just finished one of the three most important books I've ever read - "This is How they Tell Me the World Ends" by Nicole Perlroth. The other two were "Gulag Archepelago" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn which I read in the '80s and which revealed in terrifying detail the totalitarian control of lives under the Soviet Union (a tradition kept alive to some degree in Russia under Putin), and "The Fifth Risk" by Michael Lewis which demonstrated Trump's attack on the U.S. government by driving scientific and diplomatic expertise out of the government (the Fifth Risk was the risk we didn't know was coming - and the COVOD19 was just one of the unforeseen risks that came that our government was crippled in dealing with - Cyber Warfare is the one discussed in this book)
Nicole Perlroth's sobering book is revealing that we are in the middle of a war, and we are just hanging on by the skin of our teeth - the Cyber War.
Our military is amazingly powerful - for fighting future WWIIs - planes, missiles, bombs, tanks, ships, automatic weapons, etc. But why bother bombing a city of an enemy when all you have to do is shut down the power grid via Cyberwarfare. No power, no gasoline, no money, no food. Everyone turns on each other trying to survive and most of them die. Why bother sending a missile to take out refineries of chemical plants if you can just take over the control systems remotely and blow them up?
Russia is in our power grids and can shut them down. Are we in theirs? Probably.
Russia is in our nuclear power plants and can take over the controls and force them to explode - a nuclear bomb but spewing almost infinitely endless radiation into the nation. Are we in theirs? Probably.
Russia is in our refineries and chemical plants and can open or close valves, shut down or overspeed to destruction pumps and compressors, and cause them to explode. Are we in theirs? Probably.
Russia is in our hydroelectric dams and can open them up to flood the areas downstream. Are we in theirs? Probably.
They are in the PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers) that control all the valves, turbines, motors, safety devices etc etc. If you control those you can destroy anything.
Someone is in hospitals and can shut them down, and someone already has shut down hundreds of them with Ransomware.
It's not just Russia. China, Iran, and North Korea are already inside much of the U.S. cyberworld. And they are not friendly visitors.
I think that China is more interested in stealing technology so they can become the emerging economic and military power. We know China has stolen billions of dollars of intellectual property.
I think North Korea is more interested in stealing money that they desperately need. We know North Korea has extorted many millions of dollars to keep its economy from collapsing. The company I work for was hit with a ransomware attack and we could not use our computers for a couple of weeks.
I think Russia is most interested in destroying America and thereby destroying democracy around the world so as to cripple world wide opposition to its despotic rule.
Incredibly, the former president seems to have been doing his best to enable his "friend", Vladimir Putin, to attack our cyber world. He astonishingly eliminated the role of Cybersecurity Coordinator, the job of stopping the attacks, in 2018. All to please his master, Vladimir Putin and aid in Putin's attacks on America and the American elections.
Astonishingly, the Republican majority leader, Mitch McConnell in 2020 refused to support any election security bill regardless of how bipartisan it would be - so Russia did its best to repeat its efforts to elect the Former Guy in 2020 - and failed, blessedly.
The cyber Rubicon was crossed by the U.S. and Israel with Stuxnet, a cyber attack on Iran's nuclear centrifuges destroying them and setting back their march toward The Bomb. It was for a good cause. But, that opened the door for international Cyber War by all parties.
And all are having a real party, indeed.
