Russian Cyber Security Threats Far From Over

Every American Citizen, every large corporation, and every government agency down to the local level has in some way been affected by cyber hacking. Today, we are aware of the threat personally and we go out of our way to protect our personal information. Still, that doesn’t mean someone we do business with that has our personal data won’t fall victim to a cyber hack or attack. Regardless of what you believe the cyber hacking risks are, it is a present danger. It’s a reality.

We’ve all heard by the media that Russia hacked our last presidential election, and while there is a lot of dispute about what actually happened in the Democratic National Committee hack, the incident does show the vulnerability to our most sacred trust – our free and fair elections. We don’t need to enumerate the endless times our personal financial data or at least our personal information has gotten into the hands of cybercriminals – we all remember the big Target Stores hack and the Experian Credit Agency hack where 50-million plus names and records were taken, much of which probably ended up on the dark web.

Some have warned that Russia is a big culprit, but they are hardly alone. We are being constantly cyber-attacked by the Chinese Communist Party’s cyberwarfare division. We’ve seen data breaches at the hands of the Iranians and North Koreans according to reports from cyber defense and foreign policy researchers. Often our allies and quasi-allies snoop to check up on our government through their spy apparatus. How does all this happen you wonder?

Well, there are many ways nation-state sponsored cyber attacks occur and much of it is as clever as it is insidious. For instance, Kaspersky Lab’s is an innovation company in Russia that embeds codes into its technologies allowing it access to your data or government data. The Chinese have companies like ZTE and Huawei that make hardware and operate as ISPs and networks. They often send all the traffic through China and back, thus have all the data that’s not encrypted or is encrypted with common methods, and all the time in the world to figure out how to break into much of the super-encrypted data.


Because many countries are building country-wide internet systems that are stand-alone, nation-wide intranets if you will, this makes it hard for the U.S. to control its data when anyone is moving information through those intranets. Malware can be installed in devices allowing access later when people communicate through those systems. Iran, China, and many other nations have these systems already, say non-profit foreign policy and digital security researchers at the FDD.

It’s important to keep the internet free, but heavy-handed regimes don’t want a free internet that could undermine its internal propaganda which it relies on to keep their populations blind and in check.

China was caught using a WiFi on Trump Tower to collect information during the transition period to the Trump Administration which was proven using the latest science and technology information. You can see the challenges that our government faces with information secrecy, international negotiations, and internal communication with all the cyber spying going on.

This on top of the incredible amount of intellectual property theft that the Russians, Chinese, and Iranians are all well known for – which includes corporate espionage of research and development as well as in our universities. China has even been caught hacking into biotech firms working on vaccines as companies race to find a vaccine for Covid-19 to sell to the world.

This becomes even more problematic as such governments use these tools of communication to spy on their own people. The techniques, hardware, software, and sensors along with a devious strategy in combination is a scary prospect. China is one nation that has it all figured out according to cyber security and foreign policy think tanks.

Meanwhile, they are exporting this technology to other nations, both quasi-client nation-states and governments who have the money to pay them to upgrade to all the promises of 5G. If a nation-state can’t afford the technology the Communist Chinese Party will lend them the money as part of a larger infrastructure project perhaps and create another debtor nation to control for their own accord and future purposes, which have been known to be numerous which is well documented in up to date research on cyber security issues from FDD.

These nations with the new technology often have leaders who are less-than freedom and liberty loving, and more into Machiavellian power attributes note researchers on international cyber security and foreign policy. China, Iran, Russia and other nations in the Middle East and elsewhere have gotten so good at controlling their narrative and immediately stomping out dissent that they’ve used the same techniques to use their propaganda in Europe, Canada, Australia, the United States and much of the rest of the world.

In the United States, we have freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and this naturally extends to the Internet, social networks, and our media. This becomes an invitation for other nations to use our freedoms and information flow against us. Unfortunately, even though we know they are doing it, if we stop them, we look like hypocrites to our own population and to the world as we proclaim that transparency, democracy, and freedom should be unencumbered. It undermines our moral authority for human rights as well.

Another problem is that if we stop their propaganda through taking down anti-U.S. Government content meant to sew discontent, animosity, and distrust here at home, we shouldn’t be too surprised when they take down our message to the whole of humanity to demand freedom and liberty within their own countries and to hold their governments accountable.

The dilemma becomes how to make cyberspace safe for democracy. How do we prevent cyber hacking of our elections and the infiltration of foreign propaganda to sway our elections while still keeping the Internet free and maintaining freedom in the media? These become extremely tough questions to answer, but it is a problem we can no longer ignore as we move forward.