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November 25, 2024 - 10:00am
In the final years of the Second World War, as the Allied governments anticipated the defeat of Nazi Germany, Lancaster House was the seat of the European Advisory Commission, which was charged with recommending solutions to the political problems in a post-war Europe. This week, Lancaster House will host the Nato Cyber Defence Conference, where the alliance will discuss a very different set of problems in what looks disconcertingly like a pre-war Europe.
One of these problems is the growing likelihood of cyber attacks launched by Russia on Nato countries. Yesterday, The Sunday Telegraph published excerpts of a speech that is to be made later today by Pat McFadden, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, addressing this threat. McFadden will reportedly warn that “Russia is exceptionally aggressive and reckless in the cyber realm”, and would be able to “turn the lights off for millions of people. It can shut down the grid. This is the hidden war Russia is waging with Ukraine.”
In addition to being a testing ground for new weaponry such as AI-assisted drones and hypersonic missiles, the war in Ukraine has become an arena for large-scale cyber warfare. Russia’s cyber attacks on Ukraine began in 2015, long before the 2022 invasion, in the first confirmed cyber operation on a national energy grid — which actually did turn the lights off for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians. Similar attacks have been repeated throughout the war, most notably in the first months of the invasion, in concert with kinetic attacks on the grid.
However — and with some irony — as a legacy of the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s energy grid is state-owned, and therefore has significant reserve capacity, making it resilient to such attacks. By contrast, many of Europe’s energy grids are controlled by the market, which maximises for efficiency, but leaves them vulnerable. One of the main topics at this week’s conference will be how to build similar resilience into European and Nato countries’ grids.
Cyber, however, is only one piece of Russia’s hybrid-warfare model — the integration of numerous non-military means of conflict and proxy wars, backed by the threat of military force, to achieve strategic goals. The origins of the doctrine were conceived by General Valery Gerasimov in an article published in 2013, in which he wrote that “the role of non-military means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness.”
With the war taking up so much attention in the media, it is easy to miss the escalating string of these “non-military means” of destabilisation which have been deployed against European countries since it began. These have included instances of sabotage and arson, GPS-signal jamming, disinformation campaigns, weaponised people-smuggling, and phone-hacking — much of it variously connected to Russia. This is hybrid warfare in action, deployed to disrupt, confuse, and blur the lines between peace and wartime.
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Subscribe‘ These have included instances of sabotage and arson, GPS-signal jamming, disinformation campaigns, weaponised people-smuggling,…’
Weaponised people-smuggling?
Starmer is readying Britain’s hotels to defend against this….
I’m not sure why the author assumes that Russia’s cyber warfare capabilities would be superior to those of the West.
The fact that Russia (and China) appear to be more active in this area tells you almost nothing about their relative capabilities and strengths compared to those of the US. We can be fairly certain that the real capabilities of the US are greater than what’s been on public display.
We know, for example, that Israel used the Stuxnet virus to cripple Iran’s uranium enrichment centrifuges.
Why does he assume that the Russian power generation network would be any more robust than those in the West ? Or the Russian oil and gas industry (for which much of the heavy technical work was done by Western consultants until the 2022 sanctions were applied).
We also know from WWII that British and US security technology was far superior to that of Germany and Japan. To suggest that we don’t know what we’re doing in this domain seems foolish.
I work in information security and I can tell you quite straightforwardly that it isn’t up to snuff. The state of information security within the US is abysmal and I can tell you that Britain is an order of magnitude worse, as I saw by looking at a recent listing for a senior security engineer makes about as much as I did when I started in the industry 10 years ago.
We aren’t prepared for a cyber war and would lose handily.
I’m stocking 90s era dos video games on CD-ROM (Diablo II, Warcraft II…), to play in my basement.
Just in case.
Surely the headline should be simply: UK not ready for any facet of war.
Oh, I don’t know. You have lots of nice horses.
Another nothing story. Nothing new to tell. Maybe the writer got a PR release from Pat McFadden, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and made a few edits.
“where the alliance will discuss a very different set of problems in what looks disconcertingly like a pre-war Europe.”
Is that not new?
Was the idea of cyber attacks new to you? Did this story enlighten you any more than you were before reading it?
It wasn’t the cyber attacks I referred to.
The story is about cyber warfare. The fact that some people will discuss a “different set of problems” re. cyber warfare, amounts to nothing, it tells us nothing except there’s a discussion coming up about something we were already aware of. Maybe you weren’t aware of this yourself. What is it exactly you think is “new”?
Putin warns that unstoppable missiles will hit countries supplying missiles to Ukraine.
So the government immediately starts talking about cyber-warfare…..
Disinformation.
Or perhaps it just takes a while for them to prepare the message and get it out?
The Lancaster House event will have taken months to plan, so why make a facile point about a very serious subject? And then, use the “disinformation” line which is precisely what brings the use of it into disrepute.
Are people itching to get their Cold War back? For years and years, Europe loved the highly affordable energy that Putin provided. Its economies, particularly Germany’s, benefitted from it.
There were no shrill threats of expansionism or invasion or whatever else. There was, however, the endless effort push NATO eastward despite warnings that this would end badly. There were multiple instances of meddling in Ukraine’s govt in hopes of seating “the right” leader. And it’s not like the West is alien to this cyber stuff.
It looks like there, as here, there is a great determination to continue pushing for further conflict, for greater escalation. To what end?
Or maybe Putin has always meant what he has said about getting back control over Eastern Europe?
so he waited 20+ years to do it and started by going to the aid of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine? That’s quite the nine-dimensional chess game.
Your nine dimensional chess game is merely someone else’s patience and incremental manoeuvres on their own terms.
Seriously, he has stated it in plain enough terms. He’s also said it isn’t just ethnic Russians he’d ‘protect’, it’s pretty much anyone who says they want to be Russian, which is convenient to say the least.
‘A pre-war Europe’? Wasn’t ‘pre-war’ before New Labour and George W Bush, albeit not yet in Europe?
Why does Europe look ‘increasingly’ pre-war? Have the governments decided this as a matter of policy? Or just avoided formulating a policy to avoid it? After all, the Russian army is unlikely to be in Paris by the New Year.
At least when the lights go out in the UK, the Russians can be blamed, not a balmy day or the demolition of coal-fired power stations.
What did you think would happen when we told Russia that NATO would put advance bases in Ukraine and Georgia?
Russia’s hybrid warfare is more subtle than Europe’s and NATO’s involvement in the Ukraine War, which suggests that both sides should be talking rather than fighting each other one way or another. Europe will have to build a relationship with Russia without US bases in Europe. The US has been in Europe since 1945. That is long enough.