I’ve heard very similar claims since the 90s but it hasn’t happened yet - Russia has certainly tried but their war in Ukraine is very much physical violence with a tiny fringe of cyber warfare, and their most famous success helping Trump get elected was an old school propaganda play exploiting existing fractures in the Republican Party, not the movie plot stuff like voting system tampering.
The NSA appears to have been a little more successful with things like Stuxnet but even there it’s hard to say that had much lasting impact compared to, say, the Mossad’s more direct targeting of scientists.
This makes me think that we’re prone to dramatically overweight the importance of the types of systems we work on, and forget how most physical systems have a fair amount of robustness stemming from human operators being able to notice problems and halt things before too much damage happens.
Other things aside, the style of war Russia is engaged in has little to do with the lack of (or neglect of or unimportance of) cyber aspect, it has more to do with the fact that Russian officials did not expect a war at all. For them it was more of "freeing good population from their bad and corrupt government", to the point that some troops had their parade uniform when going to Ukraine, to celebrate rather than to fight.
So the physical presence was a requirement since it is hard to parade remotely ;-)
[EDIT] Clarify the point
Oh, they definitely weren’t prepared but if anything I’d have expected them to lean more on cyber attacks since they’re faster than getting tanks out of long-term storage and shipping them across the country. There have been some reports of activity but I found it interesting how what was widely predicted to be a major threat has been so marginal.
The NSA appears to have been a little more successful with things like Stuxnet but even there it’s hard to say that had much lasting impact compared to, say, the Mossad’s more direct targeting of scientists.
This makes me think that we’re prone to dramatically overweight the importance of the types of systems we work on, and forget how most physical systems have a fair amount of robustness stemming from human operators being able to notice problems and halt things before too much damage happens.
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