You haven't crossed the red line yet. Keep trying.

I read through the transcript of another podcast from Gaslit Nation, this one titled A New Era of Cyberwar. Hosts Andrea Chalupa and Sarah Kendzior brought on Andy Greenberg of WIRED. His latest book is Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt or the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers.

Perhaps I should start with an explanation of the series title Gaslit Nation. There were movies made in Britain in 1940 and America in 1944 with the title Gaslight. In both of them a female character is repeatedly told that what she sees and hears is not true. The term gaslighting means a form of psychological abuse in which the victim is manipulated into doubting their own reality, to undermine their confidence and credibility.

Kendzior and Chalupa are saying that the nasty guy, the GOP, and the entire transnational crime syndicate in which they operate is gaslighting the entire nation. An example is the brazen attempts to declare that Ukraine hacked the 2016 election and not Russia.

Here’s Greenberg’s summary of the book:

This is a story about a cyberwar that unfolded in Ukraine that the world has watched unfold without reacting, without coming to the defense of this country in the shadow of Russia. As a few, Cassandra has warned that this cyberwar was going to spill out to the rest of the world, and it did. That is the arc of the book. By the time that we felt the effects of this cyberwar in the West, it was too late. I think that you guys have told the story of Ukraine as something of like a canary in a coal mine for the West, and this story kind of mirrors that as well.

Ukraine is a land caught between East and West. It is the borderlands, the pawn that both sides fight over. Through history it has been intertwined with Russia. Chalupa has said many times, “It’s a miracle that Ukraine as a country even exists.” Ukranians want what they see in London or LA – to be able to rules themselves and not be anyone’s pawn.

At the moment Russia wants to pull Ukraine back into its sphere of influence. So Russia does to Ukraine what it intends to do to the rest of the world. And one of the first things they did was meddle in the Ukrainian election in 2014, two years before they would do the same thing in America. To understand Putin and what he intends for the world look at what he’s doing in Ukraine.

In December of both 2015 and 2016 Russia hacked the Ukraine power grid and turned off the power to hundreds of thousands of people. Greenberg made the connection and wrote about it in WIRED. The day that issue hit the newsstands the NotPetya cyberattack hit Ukraine and spread to the rest of the world. Greenberg didn’t think his prediction would come true quite that fast. From the book’s introduction about what happened in Ukraine:

ATM and credit card payment systems inexplicably dropped offline, mass transit and the country's capital of Kyiv was crippled. Government agencies, airports, hospitals, and the postal service, even scientists monitoring radioactivity levels at the ruins of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, all watched helplessly as practically every computer in their network was infected and wiped by a mysterious piece of malicious code. This is what cyberwar looks like. An invisible force capable of striking out from an unknown origin to sabotage on a massive scale, the technologies that underpin civilization.

In America one big effect was all 17 of the shipping terminals owned by Maersk were paralyzed. Ships arrived at these ports and could not be unloaded.

Because most of the damage was in Ukraine, the world barely noticed.

Partly why we didn’t notice was the big companies that were hit didn’t want to talk about it.

And our government, starting with Obama, ignored it, thinking it was just Ukraine’s problem. They’re not even in NATO.

One group of hackers is called Sandworm because some of the stuff associated with their malware references the science fiction novel Dune. So hackers who crossed all sorts of red lines deserved rebuke and punishment, which didn’t happen. The nasty guy has this big blindspot whenever there is talk of what Russia is doing in Ukraine.

The idea for these cyberattacks came from Stuxnet. This was the first malware designed to destroy something in the physical world. At a time when Iran was using centrifuges to enrich uranium this malware, created by the US and Israel, was introduced to the facility housing the centrifuges. The malware instructed them to do crazy things, which destroyed them.

Did we prevent Iran from making a nuclear bomb or stop Israel from attacking Iran? Perhaps. But we also gave Russia the idea for hackers to mess with power plants. There’s one difference – Russian hackers, Kremlin people in general, are willing to cause massive collateral damage and let civilians be harmed or killed. Stuxnet was targeted. NitPetya was not.

Some of us still think that we go “over there” to fight wars. Our oceans protect us. But cyberwarfare is without borders. Malware can easily hop an ocean. Greenberg:

Sandworm, to me, seems to be this kind of collection of motives, these disruptive acts of massive sabotage. They do send a message to the West. They say, "We have this ability, if you mess with us, we can turn off your power, we can unleash destructive worms in America." That does box in what I think the US is willing to do in Syria, in Ukraine, for instance, when we know that that capability is in Russian hands. But there's also almost terroristic effect of these attacks. They are their own sort of influence operation. They make Ukrainians scared. They make Ukrainians lose confidence in their own governments. They try to make Ukraine look like a failed State. That is, I think part of their intention.

There may be other motives for their actions. One motive might be massive machismo – I created this tool and I’m going to use it. I don’t care about the consequences of my actions. Another motive might be petty – since Russia was banned from the 2018 Olympics for doping they may have been the ones behind the hack of the Olympic computer systems. If Russia can’t enjoy the Olympics, no one will.

Greenberg again:

Hackers in countries like Iran and North Korea and Russia, they have a kind of insurgent mentality. I think they want to blow things up in part because that is how you destabilize the global order and put yourself in a better position. Whereas, the US, and even China, they use their cyber capabilities very strategically just to advance their own interests, and in a way, that is often pretty restrained and limited. Even in China's case, it's really just espionage for the most part.

And, of course, the Chinese are using these tools against their own citizens. As for the US, they have teams trying disrupt the attacks of others. But their efforts are very targeted against only the perpetrators. American teams could be causing blackouts, but are careful not to.

How to counter this? “Banks, not tanks.” Diplomacy and sanctions, not warfare. At the very least, calling it out. Greenberg said:

Why don't we see more White House statements about these unacceptable cyber attacks saying this is a red line? The arena of cyber warfare is one where the red lines are still being drawn. If you don't call out unacceptable attacks, then you essentially are telling the adversary, "Well, you haven't crossed the red line yet. Keep trying." And that's what they've done.

There should be a Geneva Convention for the internet around cyberwar. Such things as touching a hospital or a power grid are considered a war crime.