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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.
No. What good is a secret weapon if your enemy doesn't suspect you have it? I mean, come on. This is elementary.
You are welcome on my lawn.
er no, using a nuke against a carrier is declaration of world war III and would be answered as such.
get a clue, fuckwit "senior source"
Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh?
It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Maybe the laws of skulduggery have changed since I was a young whippersnapper, but isn't one of the most important aspects of a secret weapon for it to be secret?
UK doing what China and Russia have been doing: "bragging of a secret weapon". It's not secret once you tell everyone- and there is no strategic advantage in telling everyone... therefore... it's probably not real. Just like China's secret laser pistols and Russia's secret Nuclear weapons that can bypass western anti-missile technology.
If it were real, you don't tell people, because if you tell people they can work on solutions to stop it. If it is real- you keep it secret so you have a strategic advantage over the opposition.
Therefore- I call "FAKE" on this.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Putin personally authorized military attack by officers against UK civilians with a chemical weapon, and while it only injured the targets due to the ineptitude of the assassins their rushed ditching of evidence resulted in actual civilian deaths. Putin authorized it without declaring war, so an equal action assassinating him by any means necessary is simply proportional response. And no need to declare war either.
Oh yes. Chill Wills yelling, "Wahooooo....." on top of a nuke dropped from a radio-broken B-52. ... There's a hush, all over the world, tonight.....
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Suppose I tell you that I've got a secret weapon that can destroy your house at the push of a button. How are you supposed to go about stopping it if that's all you know about it? I'm sure there are a lot of things that you could do, but the majority of them may be wasted effort.
Hell, maybe I just wanted you to spend time and resources trying to protect your house against destruction when what I'm really going to do is steal your car. You might be too preoccupied elsewhere to notice. Or maybe I'm not interested in your car at all, but I want to make AC nervous about the fact that I might be able to destroy his house as well, so maybe he'd better return my lawn mower like I've been asking before I train the secret weapon on him instead.
Perhaps my reasoning is far more complex or sinister than any of that. I wouldn't take anything in politics at face value.
There is plenty of evidence.
If it were real, you don't tell people, because if you tell people they can work on solutions to stop it. If it is real- you keep it secret so you have a strategic advantage over the opposition.
Moscow isn't the real target . . . it's Brussels.
The Brexit negotiations have gotten tangled up in a snag, and the UK needs additional leverage.
Theresa May is looking a bit weak and vulnerable right now, so this will make her look stronger in the eyes of the UK people.
Putin is just laughing this off . . . if the UK turns off just one Lava Lamp in Moscow . . . the UK will be awash in Novichok and Polonium.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
No, you definitely want the other guys to know you've got a superweapon, while at the same time maintaining under the pretext of secrecy the position that nobody should have such weapons.
Weapons are in general much better for having (or more to the point, being known to have) than for using.
Let me illustrate this with an example. Suppose you have a devastatingly powerful karate chop. If you walk into a bar where everyone knows this, you'll be treated with respect. If you walk into a bar where nobody knows this, you might actually have to use it, and then you'll find out whether it's better than what anyone else there happens to have, which you can't know for sure in advance.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
A badass known to have a devastating karate chop walks into a bar in Moscow...
and is suddenly staring down the barrels of 15 guns. Oops.
More seriously, the biggest vulnerability of power stations to cyberattack comes from operational laziness on the part of the power utility. Not implementing IT patches and IT security best practices in general. Not updating power switching relays to have the latest more secured firmware and communication protocols, etc etc.
Being warned in advance that you have a serious threat from a well resourced nation-state actor allows you to tighten up cybersecurity and likely prevent such an attack. No, this kind of information leak, if true, reflects a new level of dumbassery.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Maybe the laws of skulduggery have changed since I was a young whippersnapper, but isn't one of the most important aspects of a secret weapon for it to be secret?
Yes, which suggests a deliberate reason to release this info (which Russia probably knew already.)
It is a declaration to the people in Russia and the west, so the Russian leaders who are hacking the west, now have fearful citizens worried about an attack, more accurately a counter attack, in response to their Russian leaders' gameplaying.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Have you been in a coma since 1990? Russia has waged continuous warfare against everyone from Chechnya (3 going on 4 times), Transnistria, Georgia, Ukraine, Syria, and everybody who sneezed near their military "contractors" in Sudan and the Central African Republic.
seems to me to be the cause of many problems today. These are people who have got to the top in their country, they start by beating up political opponents, often ensure their position (head of state for a long time), then go into other countries and hurt people. I won't mention names, but there are plenty around.
Add in a polonium poisoning that left a trail of radioactive material all over London. Then there where the British citizen's killed in the downing of MH17. Plenty of grounds for a proportionate response of getting ride of the bastard before he authorizes any more actions which kill British citizens.
Regular nuclear weapons already bypass anti-missile technology, the technology isn't even able to hit things that broadcast their exact positioning. And nothing worse than x-band radar (very expensive) can tell the difference between chaff and warheads anyway.
Wrong. Our public anti missile technology is pretty damn effective. The simplest and most effective strategy against missile defense systems is to send a bunch of warheads and overwhelm the defenses. As long as some get through you succeed. You can either target multiple locations at once or litter a single target. You can do it from multiple locations around the globe or from just one with MIRV.
As for our non-public missile defense systems, lasers make even the fastest missile look slow. Once this becomes public it'll be almost useless.
Overwhelming laser systems with numbers will still be effective, but you'll need more numbers. You don't need to send hundreds of warheads however, just hundreds of targets, a few of which are real.
But nuts who actually launch nukes will configure them to just detonate in atmosphere if they detect a temperature increase from a laser (and if they're far enough away from their own nation, perhaps). For these kinds of crazies the target isn't a specific location but a nation as a whole. Getting close is close enough.
Do you really think the Hawaii missile alert was an accident?
Sometimes the point of a secret weapon is only to keep the exact workings secret. Having the capabilities known can be a valuable deterrent. If all your possible future adversaries know you have a 'nuke target country into faintly glowing dust' button, they are unlikely to openly attack you for fear of escalation. That is how the cold war played out: Both both major players and many of their allies nuclear-capable, open war was no longer an option, so they instead competed for power using campaigns of espionage, soft power projection and supporting rival sides in proxy wars. It wasn't a pleasant time for the countries caught in the middle, but it still averted nuclear annihilation. Though there were a few close calls.
The idea is the same: If the UK has the capability to launch effective cyber-attacks that would inconvenience Russia's civilian population and cause severe economic damage, hopefully Russia will refrain from carrying out similar attacks of their own first.
I think you mean the Russian military. The Buk launcher came from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade of the Russian Federation, had been transported from Russia on the day of the crash, fired from a field in a rebel-controlled area, and the launcher returned to Russia after it was used to shoot down MH17.
A video from the crash site, recorded by the rebels and obtained by News Corp Australia, shows the first rebel soldiers to arrive at the crash site. At first they assumed that the downed aircraft was a Ukrainian military jet, and were dismayed when they started to realise that it was a civilian airliner.
Immediately after the shooting down, a post appeared on the VKontakte social media profile attributed to Igor Girkin, leader of the Donbass separatist militia, claiming responsibility for shooting down a Ukrainian An-26 military transporter near Torez. This post was removed later the same day, and the separatists then denied shooting down any aircraft.
It was absolutely the fault of a Russia sanctioned mission to interfere in a foreign nation militarily to down Ukrainian military planes because the rebels had none and it was a problem for them. It might not have been intentional but it was the direct result of a reckless plan sanctioned by Vladimir Putin.
I am quite sure the death of Dawn Sturgess was not intentional either, but frankly it does not matter. Both where the direct result of reckless actions and Putin is responsible.