#cyber attacks

Moscow has tried to undermine the coherence, unity, and indivisibility of NATO. In fact, Russian actions were aimed at holding NATO-Russia relations hostage in a post-truth world.

The unclassified version of the 2013 Annual Report to Congress on the Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China provides a glimpse of the military build-up and capabilities of China in the second decade of the 21st century: “The U.S. Department of Defense seeks to build a military-to-military relationship with China that is sustained and substantive, while encouraging China to cooperate […]

“It’s all psychological. You yell barracuda, everybody says, ‘Huh? What?’ You yell shark, we’ve got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July.” In the summer of 1975, the budding auteur, Steven Spielberg, created a virtual panic at America’s beaches with ingeniously crafted screen images of a certain Great White Fish. The top […]

Currently, remote warfare — namely, drone warfare and issues around cyber attacks — is occupying a large part of the national security debate in the United States. Developments like the Mandiant report, which implicated China’s military in cyber attacks on U.S. business and government, and Rand Paul’s Senate filibuster of now-CIA chief John Brennan’s nomination, […]

My colleague Dr. Greg Austin and I wrote a short discussion paper titled “Cybersecurity: Crime Prevention  or Warfare?”  for the 49th Munich Security Conference which took place this February in Munich, Germany. We identified some of the top challenges pertaining to cybersecurity and outlined six policy action ideas. Given the recent revelations about the Chinese […]

Following the failure of his nomination of Susan Rice to head the Defense Department, President Obama has nominated Chuck Hagel, 66, a former Republican senator and Vietnam veteran as the next Secretary of Defense. Hagel was awarded two Purple Hearts for wounds he received serving as an infantry squad leader in Vietnam, then entered the […]

  At risk of tooting the horn for my former employer, IEEE Spectrum magazine, I want to commend my former colleagues and fellow bloggers for sharply raising the question of whether the U.S. government considered the global consequences when it decided to unleash Stuxnet and, most likely, Flame as well. In a Monday post, Robert […]

Me culpa. Yesterday I speculated about the origins of Flame and noted at the outset that Stuxnet generally is attributed to Israel, perhaps with the United States as an accessory. In an exhaustive report published this morning, the New York Times reports that Stuxnet was in fact a U.S. product, part of a cyber-sabotage program […]

Perhaps it is a complete coincidence that Brazil experienced a massive blackout affecting 60 million people only days after last week’s 60 Minutes showed a segment on cyber attacks on infrastructure including banks, internal governmental computer systems and power grids. In it, they mentioned a previously successful attack on a major electric power grid, which sources […]

One of the ironies of Pax Americana is that it rests upon the nuclear bombing of Japan at the end of the Second World War. Yet this searing and incontrovertible statement of technological superiority, power and the will to use it has not been the final word on global security for some time. Nuclear weapons […]