Concerns have mounted that Russia's next move in the Ukrainian crisis could embroil the US in a targeted cyberattack, a strategy that experts argue is a battlefront already embedded in how global superpowers engage.
Earlier this week, reports surfaced showing that the Department of Homeland Security DHS issued an internal memo to law enforcement agencies warning that Russia could launch a cyberattack against the US if Washington or NATO is a threat to its long-term national security. The DHS issued a warning last week to U.S. companies and government agencies about an imminent cyberthreat from Russia, and warned them of an imminent cyberthreat from Russia.
As U.S. agencies and businesses prepare for a potential attack at critical infrastructure, NATO Deputy Secretary-General Mircea Geoan said Tuesday that it is doing everything possible to defend Ukraine's cybersecurity.
Geoan said that the transatlantic innovation benefits all allies because of the cyberattacks against the Ukrainian government this month by suspected Russian hackers. Some fear the use of cyberattacks could escalate as tensions in eastern Europe remain high.
The Russians call it a bloodless way, Rebekah Koffler, a former Defense Intelligence Agency DIA intelligence officer for Russian doctrine and strategy, told Fox News Digital. You don't need to spill blood to destabilize the society and gradually weaken it to achieve your objectives. She said that they wanted to achieve their goals by weakening us gradually without kinetic action, and referring to the Kremlin's goal to destabilize the U.S. without traditional military strikes.
Experts told Fox News Digital that cyberwarfare is not a far-off strategy of the future but rather a tactic that has already become fully embedded in how global superpowers confront one another.
According to Klon Kitchen, a former intelligence officer with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence ODNI and senior fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, the United States is already at the point where no major nation will engage in any meaningful military operation without some kind of cyber capability being brought to bear.
He said that cyber is an integrated and persistent feature of modern warfare and that it is a key feature in the geopolitical toolbox, similar to information operations, coercive diplomacy and sanctions.
Recent years, cyberattacks coming from Russia have increased, including the back-to-back hits on the first, the largest U.S. fuel pipeline, and the second, a major U.S. meat supplier.
For the first time in over a decade, cyberattacks were listed as a greater threat to the U.S. than a mass-casualty terrorist attack, according to a report released by the Council on Foreign Relations earlier this month.
Jeh Charles Johnson, the former DHS secretary under President Obama, said during a virtual summit following the publication of the report that cyberspace is the 21st century battleground. Johnson believes that covert actors are replacing conventional actors and cyberattacks are replacing kinetic attacks. The Russians equate cyberweapons with nuclear weapons because of the devastating effect they can produce and the ability to achieve strategic objectives, Koffler said. But both Kitchen and Koffler argued that the potential for cyberwarfare to escalate quickly serves as a deterrent. They noted that mutual destruction is not a foolproof deterrent when it comes to cyberattacks.
The Russians believe that they are more vulnerable to a cyberattack than they are because every aspect of our civilian life, including our war-fighting capability, is highly dependent on cyber, Koffler, author of Putin's Playbook: Russia's Secret Plan to Defeat America, said.
The experts said that neither Russia nor the U.S. have the ability to fend off a cyberattack.
When we were in the intelligence community, we used to think of the threat as enemy intentions, enemy capabilities. Kitchen told Fox News Digital that they have the capabilities. The big deterrence for that is not going to be our defense, but it is necessary that it is going to be their knowledge of what we can do to them.
He said the United States has the ability to turn Russia off.
Koffler and Kitchen said that there was a sense of deterrence to avoid a full-blown cyberwar because of the threat of how a cyberwar could escalate into a traditional military conflict.