The US Armed Forces are actively preparing for cyber wars, the generals have published a specialized manual on hacker operations. The instruction tells about "anonymous enemies", "every second encroachment on democracy" and defines "military operations in cyberspace".
The manual, already sensational by some experts, speaks for the first time about the possibility of retaliatory actions by the military. It is reported that the army can and will attack other countries' Networks if necessary. For this, there is already the first special unit. More than a year ago, a special "cyberteam" based in Texas began work. Its main task is to ensure the protection of key computing centers of the Pentagon.
However, after the appearance of this instruction, many experts started talking about the fact that the cyber team can perform not only defensive functions. From the text of the manual it is clear that the army is ready precisely for "operations in cyberspace", and this implies a response to attacks.
James Lewis, an expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said: "The primary task of the online army is defense, and offensive operations are usually not advertised. Therefore, I was puzzled by the almost open statement of readiness to attack a networked enemy."
A similar opinion is shared by Noah Shachtman, a researcher at the Brookings Intellectual Institute, contributing editor of Wired: “The document explains examples of our military actions. shocked by the openness of the statements. I do not understand how such a realistic plan of cyber war broke out from under the secret stamp."
Deliberately exaggerating, the authors of the military instruction write that American networks, home and office, are subjected to millions of hacker attacks every second. Some of them are just hooliganism, but acts of real terrorists are also involved in this stream. And for the US Army, cyber threats are not hypothetical. For example, one of the brightest episodes occurred in 2005, when hackers were able to gain access to personal classified data of more than 37,000 US military personnel through simple spam.
“That egregious case showed how low the level of computer literacy is in our army. Servicemen should be trained in basic things” - these words of Shachtman are true for most countries. For example, in 2009, one of the most dangerous network worms, Conficker, infected dozens of computers belonging to the German army. Some machines contained sensitive data.
Many countries are also focused on new types of threats, and therefore are actively creating their own military cyber units. According to some reports, there are already 30 states, including Russia. And one of the leaders of the direction is Israel, which even managed to try its online army in action. Three years ago, IDF hackers injected a virus into the enemy's computer air defense control system, as a result of which Syrian radars overlooked the invasion of Israeli combat bombers.
