I think there are probably many parties contributing to the interference in the Eastern Mediterrarnean. Russia and Israel are two of the big ones right now (and both have admitted doing it).
The clear suggestion is that it is Russia doing it.
Other than as an f-u, I don’t understand why they would though. If I have an effective weapon (GPS spoofer), surely I don’t want to alert the enemy to it, lest they develop defences. So eg say NATO were overreliant on GPS, incidents of spoofing like this will cause them to rethink and reduce that reliance, or harden the system.
We’ve seen other stories, Stuxnet in particular that implicate other countries like Israel. Anyone that thinks that the USA and Israel are spending money on cyber warfare but China and Russia are not is living in a fantasy world. Maybe some small countries like Andorra don’t have a cyber warfare division, but all the big countries do.
Everyone is being spied on. Perhaps the only distinction worth making is whether you’re being spied on by your own government in addition to foreign governments.
China has been accused of hacking and/or electronic spying by other states.
Russia has been accused of hacking and/or electronic spying by other states.
North Korea has been accused of hacking and/or electronic spying by other states.
And yes, the US and quite a few European states -- and many other countries -- have also been accused of hacking and/or electronic spying by other states[a].
All these governments are playing with explosives: The right spark at the wrong place at the wrong time can start a fire.
Seemingly "minor" incidents have triggered wars in the past.[b]
Can you please give me a proof that it's China and not someone else...or nothing at all?
I always hear cyber-attack's from Russia, North Korea or China, but never from Israel or the US, are they just so bad in covering up or is maybe something else behind it?
It's interesting to speculate whether the Middle East is just more susceptible to attack, or if these hacks are just cyber-weapons deployed by a Western power. It seems like the US could be hit just as hard, unless there's something fundamentally insecure going on in the Middle East.
It always struck me as improbable that all these high profile (and notoriously hard/impossible to attribute) attacks on “critical infrastructure” or whatever are always instantly and authoritatively pinned (by US authorities) on groups operating in the US’s geopolitical enemies.
I wonder if we're hearing the full story. Could they be being attacked by foreign hacker farms in Russia and China just to make the US infrastructure look bad?
If we are talking malware being leaked or escaping to the wild, it's more like the US, Israel and maybe some not-yet-caught European states cooperating with them.
I always wonder where EU fits into the malware scene. We already know which countries have these kind of espionage tools: US, Russia, China, North Korea, Israel.
So is EU really that ethical to not engage in these kinds of moves? Or they are smart enough not to get discovered? Or somebody here will point out that I'm just not up to date?
...its a long list...but the most infections happen in Iran and only a few countries have both interests in Iran and the spy infrastructure to get the infection spread to a network of computers as it was not internet spread.
What should concern NSA and US citizens is that it was attacks against some systems that wee air-gapped just like USA military systems in war zones...ie in other words NSA just advertised that anyone can do it..not too bright of advertisement
A friend in the military told me years ago France was the number one hacker of the US gov. It goes both ways.
This may have shifted over time as China, Russia, NK, Iran increase their attacks, but it doesn’t diminish the fact that the EU is also hacking the US without repercussions.
It would be better to tighten security and prevent such activity, than to accuse any state actor, accusing a state actor, I would guess, gives them more power in political negotiations.
As far as I understand, its mostly impossible to be certain who did what in hacking since the location doesn't really determine who it is.
Almost as if Russia and the US are being pitted against each other, ignoring the other major hacking nation-state.
More than half of all visits to my website are from a single Asian country. Extra points to you if you can guess it. Visits from Russia and other ex-Soviet block countries amount to about 2%.
Interesting that you're leaving out Israel from your listing while the very subject of this article is Israeli offensive cyberwar and espionage capabilities and a profound lack of ethics.
What I was trying to convey originally is that attribution is politically expedient. If you want to saber-rattle towards China you task Mandiant to find proof of Chinese hacking, if you want to blame Russia Crowdstrike gets the job. It's like employing McKinsey consulting to give a veneer of credibility to a predetermined outcome.
Audacious hackers my ass. That was clearly the job of some major foreign intelligence service. The triangle of tampered antennas included among other things the US embassy. Granted, we Greeks have a tendency for conspiracy theories, especially if they involve Americans, but this particular attack was way too sophisticated to be carried by individuals. And how on earth would an individual gain access to network infrastructure of one of the largest carrier providers in the country?
Not to mention the fact that everyone in the list of targets were in one way or the other directly connected with the government. Hackers usually don’t go for such high-profile targets unless there are some state actors involved.
Not really, it could even be the Chinese if you want to get really conspiratorial.
However, looking at the behaviour of Russia recently with their non-linear war, $300m spent on information warfare, invasion of Ukraine, support of dictatorship abroad etc. who is the more likely to have bombed this infrastructure is highly debatable at least.
See this report by C4ADS from 2019, about Russian jamming: https://c4ads.org/reports/above-us-only-stars/
Map of Israeli GPS spoofing (which is distinct from jamming, and we haven't talked much about in this discussion): https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1717987479255720076
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