"We joke that we yearn for a fight we can win with a gun, because the idea of a physical invasion is actually preferable to the constant uncertainty of economic, information, and political shadow warfare from the Kremlin. Combatants in these shadow wars bear no designations, and protections against these methods are few. From the front lines, in the absence of the fabric of reassurance woven from our values and principles and shared sacrifice — and in the absence of the moral clarity of purpose derived from “us and them” — civil society is left naked, unarmored.
[..] It’s also important to acknowledge that a more isolated, more nationalist America helps Putin in his objectives even while it compromises our own. We need to accept that America was part of, and needs to be part of, a global system — and that this system is better, cheaper, and more powerful than any imagined alternatives. For many years, the United States has been the steel in the framework that holds everything together; this is what we mean by ‘world order’ and ‘security architecture,’ two concepts that few politicians try to discuss seriously with the electorate.
[..] When it’s us against them, they were, and are, never going to be the winner. But when it's “all against all” — a “multipolar” world with “multi-vector” policy, a state of shifting alliances and permanent instability — Russia, with a centrally controlled, tiny command structure unaccountable for its actions in any way, still has a chance for a seat at the table. They pursue the multipolar world not because it is right or just, but because it is the only world in which they can continue to matter without pushing a nuclear launch sequence."
http://www.politico.com/magazine/st
""It's the worst thing that can happen to you in television," Mr Bigot told me in his Paris office.
It quickly became clear that the network had been subject to a serious cyber-attack.
"We were a couple of hours from having the whole station gone for good."
Screens went blank in the foyer of TV5Monde.
It was a race against time - more systems were corrupted with every passing minute. Any substantial delay would have led satellite distribution channels to cancel their contracts, placing the entire company in jeopardy.
"We were saved from total destruction by the fact we had launched the channel that day and the technicians were there," said Mr Bigot.
"One of them was able to locate the very machine where the attack was taking place and he was able to cut out this machine from the internet and it stopped the attack."
"We owe a lot to the engineer who unplugged that particular machine. He is a hero here," Mr Bigot said.
The attack was far more sophisticated and targeted than reported at the time. The perpetrators had first penetrated the network on 23 January.
They carried out reconnaissance of TV5Monde to understand the way in which it broadcast its signals. They then fabricated bespoke malicious software to corrupt and destroy the internet-connected hardware that controlled the TV station's operations - such as the encoder systems used to transmit programmes."
Mr Bigot was later told evidence had been found that his network had been attacked by a group of Russian hackers, who are known as APT 28.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-3759
"The Russian military theory of "reflexive control," defined as "a means of conveying to a partner or an opponent specially prepared information to incline him to voluntarily make the predetermined decision desired by the initiator of the action," focuses on the distortion, shaping, and manipulation of information rather than using offensive operations to destroy information systems. All systems of communication and control -- from the human mind to an command and control network -- can be subtly degraded, disabled, or subverted by feeding them false inputs or exploiting weaknesses in how they process, evaluate, and act on information. This can be seen in how easily even advanced artificial intelligence systems can be fooled or otherwise punked by simple tricks. But human social networks also be similarly fooled with with false information and compromised by deception and manipulation.
They have not only successfully intercepted sensitive US governmental communications, but also devised and implemented a political subversion operation that leverages our politics, media, and communication architecture against us. As Joshua Foust observed, Russia's operation "exploits weaknesses in Western journalism itself."
Russia has been learning how social media helps spread stories for years. Adrian Chen followed one early effort Russia undertook on this front in 2014. He researched a Russian "troll farm," where employees of the Russian government flooded social media feeds with dummy content.
We sit at the threshold of an new era characterized by the ubiquity of adaptive, data-hungry systems and a corresponding society characterized more and more by the offloading of its collective memory, cognition, and reasoning to computers."
http://aelkus.github.io/essays/cyberpow
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