By Omar Pérez Salomón on March 16, 2022
Attacks on cybernetic systems are reported daily through the cybersecurity authorities of countries, no matter if they belong to developed or underdeveloped countries. On March 14, Russia Today (RT) in English published the news that Israel’s cybernetic authority confirmed that several government web pages suffered a denial of service (DDoS) attack. According to this media, what would be the largest cyber-attack “ever carried out against Israel” was carried out against pages using the domain ‘gov.il’, blocking access to the websites of the Ministries of the Interior, Health and Justice, as well as the Welfare Ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office.
At the same time, there are governments interested in making cyberspace a permanent theater of war. On several occasions the U.S. government or Congress has accused China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela or Cuba of sponsoring terrorism or of carrying out cyber attacks on U.S. entities. It all depends on the international situation at the time and who is the villain.
For example, two days before the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York, on February 9, 2001, Cuba became the first state accused of planning cyber attacks against the United States, when at the hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which dealt with the “global threat”, the then Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Admiral Thomas R. Wilson, identified the island as a possible “cyber attacker”.
This situation becomes critical when these actions take place in the midst of a military, economic and media war. The Xinhua news agency reported on March 12 that China has detected since the end of February, “continuous cyber-attacks, through which foreign organizations have tried to take control of computers located in the Asian giant to attack Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.
An analysis conducted by the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/China Coordination Center (CNCERT/CC) – the Chinese organization in charge of preventing, detecting, alerting and managing cyber security threats and incidents – revealed that most of the Internet addresses that launched the attacks were based in the US, with a small number of addresses based in European nations such as Germany and the Netherlands. He also reported that 87% of the attacks targeted Russia.
We cannot forget that in the mid-1980s the intelligence services of the US, several European countries and Japan maintained close links in the war being waged by imperialism against the Soviet Union. From that time is the well-known Farewell dossier, which provoked the first known case of cyber warfare, executed against the USSR. A Trojan Horse was introduced into the software that operated the pumps, turbines and valves of the gas pipeline that was to carry natural gas from the Urengoi fields in Siberia to the countries of Western Europe. Shortly after it began operation, there was a major explosion and fire that caused considerable damage, including considerable damage to the Soviet economy.
As at that time, damaging Russia’s oil and gas production and transportation is one of the priorities of the US and its European allies. Only this is not the 1980s and Russia is well aware of the West’s intentions.
Source: La Pupil Insomne, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English