The UK is Practicing Cyberattacks That Could Black Out Moscow (qz.com)

British defense officials say they have practiced cyber war games that could shut off electricity in Russia's capital, the Sunday Times (paywall) reports. From a report: The measures are part of a wider range of strategies to hit back at an increasingly assertive Russia -- accused of interfering with US elections, cyberattacks on Western targets, and poisoning a former spy on UK soil -- without resorting to a full-blown nuclear attack. "If they sank our aircraft carrier with a nuclear-tipped torpedo, what is our response? There's nothing between sinking their submarine and dropping a nuclear weapon on northern Kamchatka," one senior source told the Sunday Times. "This is why cyber is so important; you can go on the offensive and turn off the lights in Moscow to tell them that they are not doing the right things." Military planners are looking for options if Russian president Vladimir Putin tests NATO's resolve by seizing small islands belonging to Estonia, taking control of Libya's oil reserves, or using "irregular forces" to attack troops, according to the report.

Comments

This may not come off the way they want

[superwiz]

I am going to tell a joke, but I'll give a warning before telling it. So until the warning, what I say is serious. Moscow residents may not view lights-out as a foreign action. They are much, much more likely to see it as a domestic failure. And if the domestic government-owned news channels subsequently report it as such, 85% of the population will believe it. The remaining 15% never believe anything that the government says, so they won't be a political loss for the RF administration.

Here's the promised joke (because it's too close to the article itself). Question: how can you tell that the US government has fell behind the Russian government in its use of the Internet? Because, unlike the Moscow mayor's website, you can't find the scheduled water outages on the New York mayor's website. This is an actual meme that used to be popular in Russia just a few years ago. Well, it may still be popular, but I was told about it a few years ago.

Now given that Moscow has scheduled water outages, how difficult will it be to explain away electric outages which were not scheduled?