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While the number of autocratic regimes and their leverage to influence global policy has seemingly been on the rise over the past several years, we may have not yet seen the full effect these governments and entities can have regarding elections, business dealings, and human rights issues.
Unfortunately, their ability to affect these elements is becoming easier via cyber efforts around disinformation and harassment.
Frances Townsend, former adviser to President George W. Bush for counterterrorism and homeland security, believes that failing to take potential negative outcomes from autocratic efforts around cyber initiatives seriously is a mistake.
She isn’t alone. President Joe Biden recently mentioned the “extraordinary threat” that Russian cyberattacks posed to the United States and the democratic world.
“There are new vulnerabilities now, and they revolve around infrastructure and our cyber world, the internet,” Townsend said during an interview with eastwest.ngo. “It took us too long to approach cyber as a separate domain — it’s both an avenue of attack, it’s a threat and vulnerability, and it’s a wartime domain, just like air, sea, and land — but it took the United States, in terms of the policymaker, a while to think of it that way because the internet came to us as an economic engine, and we didn’t really understand it could also be a weapon of war.”
Recently, Townsend brought attention to the efforts Russia has been making with regard to controlling the narrative of its invasion of Ukraine.
Townsend, as a signatory to an open letter forwarded on April 29 by Rep. J. Lou Correa, D-Calif., to the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, Bennie Thompson, requested a rethinking of the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (Senate bill S.2292), specifically citing Russian efforts to mislead its own population about the war.
“Providing timely and accurate on-the-ground information,” Townsend et al. stated in the letter, “is essential for allowing the world to see the human toll of Russia’s aggression.”
While Russia may be the current main attraction when examining cyber attacks, it isn’t the only threat.
According to govtech.com, when looking at global attack traffic since the invasion, worldwide attacks are up across the board. And Russia isn’t the primary perpetrator.
That honor belongs to China, which online traffic tracking entity Cloudflare estimates is responsible for over 40% of the world’s cyberattacks — specifically DDoS attacks, which involve directing a large amount of traffic, typically through the use of bots, to a system to overwhelm it and prevent it from performing its basic functions — as of May 2022.
What’s more concerning are the countries on the list of the top 10 originators.
The United States comes in at No. 2 behind China, while Germany (No. 8), Ukraine (No. 9), and Spain (No. 10), make the list as well; the remaining six countries all qualify as either autocratic or oppressive regimes (Brazil, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Russia, in that order).
In other words, of the top cyberattack-originating countries, 60% of them are considered hostile or undependable by the United States.
Townsend, in the previously cited letter, wrote that while the U.S. government is aware of the damage these regimes can do, it isn’t doing enough to prevent them, following a path that Europe took previously and Townsend and her co-authors disagreed with.
“In the face of these growing threats, U.S. policymakers must not inadvertently hamper the ability of U.S. technology platforms to counter increasing disinformation and security risks, particularly as the West continues to rely on the scale and reach of these firms to push back on the Kremlin,” the letter stated.
They are referring to the passage of what is known as the Digital Markets Act, which Townsend contends passed in the EU “without any consideration of national security repercussions” to the EU and its allies.
“Cyber warfare has become a tool by nation-states to attack other countries,” Professor Sanjay Jha, deputy director of the University of New South Wales Institute for Cybersecurity, said in an interview with UNSW. “In the modern digital world, by attacking a computer server in the network of some critical piece of infrastructure, you can potentially take down an entire power system and with that, you could paralyze large parts of the economy.”
European and U.S. technology companies dominate social media and technology innovation, including efficient infrastructure operations. Access to them is key to furthering a variety of economic initiatives. But, as Townsend notes, bad actors can take advantage of those platforms if they’re not properly secured.
Recent trends have made policing these attacks even more difficult.
According to Accenture’s cyber threat intelligence report for 2021, while malware information thieves and ransomware are still the most common of threats (and often propagated for profit rather than disruption), the increased reliance on cloud-centric infrastructure has opened up new avenues for those looking to wage cyber warfare.
As the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated cloud-first options when it came to information sharing and connectivity, bad actors began to focus on these platforms because they house huge amounts of sensitive data in one spot.
The report states that there’s even now an exchange of sorts where those looking to cause harm can buy and sell information from their hacks to others.
According to Jha, it isn’t just the technological advances that are propelling these attacks. Advances in social engineering also play a large part.
“Some of the phishing nowadays is so sophisticated,” Jha said in the same interview. “So much so that even a fairly educated cybersecurity person may be tricked.”
Frances Townsend suggests that in the face of these threats, it’s important for the technology companies (particularly those in the U.S. and EU) to work hand in hand with government security entities to ensure a united front against an ever-evolving threat.
Townsend previously wrote in an op-ed for The Hill: “Throughout history, the United States has cemented its place in the geopolitical landscape as the dominant global power by advocating for democratic values and rule of law not just with rhetoric, but with action.”
In previous generations, that would have meant actionable, traditional military efforts to stem potential disasters. In the current world, that means investment in building an apparatus that not only embraces the technological advancements made in the private sector, but having a degree of control over those systems so bad actors can’t manipulate them as weapons.
