How regular citizens got caught in the crossfire of a US-Russia cyberwar

Three recent incidents have revealed this usually hidden cyberwarfare at work. A joint statement from UK and Dutch authorities has revealed that four Russian GRU agents had been expelled from the Netherlands after they'd attempted to hack the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt issued a statement on Thursday identifying Russian intelligence as the controlling body behind multiple cyberattacks by supposedly independent hacking groups.

Netherlands officials say they caught Russian spies targeting chemical weapons body

Russia has declined to comment on the GRU's involvement and denied Hunt's accusations.

Separately, Bloomberg reported the existence of a tiny hardware chip that, according to government and corporate sources, had been inserted into servers used in top US companies -- and even the CIA -- giving China access to sensitive commercial and intelligence secrets.

For those of us simply trying to get through our normal day, this kind of news is alarming: Russia and China, in different ways, are exploiting the internet to distort our information economy, steal secrets and even disrupt operations and investigations.

This is a danger unique to the internet. It's easy to do things in secret, it's easy to compromise security and it's very easy to have plausible deniability -- making it look like an independent hacker, or even a different nation state, was behind an attack.

Russia and China -- though the latter tends to be far quieter and subtler -- might be among the most prolific hackers. North Korea and numerous other nations have similar operations. It's a cheap and highly effective form of information (and real) warfare.

But this narrative leaves out the biggest and most aggressive plays in cyber warfare: the US and its close allies, including the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (known as the Five Eyes alliance), plus Israel.

Perhaps the most notorious cyberattack in history was the worm known as Stuxnet -- an aggressive, self-spreading piece of code that, when installed on a system connected to Iranian nuclear centrifuges, would cause them to spin rapidly and erratically, until they exploded.

This was not some spying exercise: it caused explosions within nuclear enrichment sites and had the potential to kill anyone nearby. Furthermore, the attack was made so aggressive it spread to millions of machines around the world -- a real collateral risk and also the reason the attack was discovered.

That attack was allegedly made by the US and Israel, with UK intelligence also playing a little-discussed role in its development.

But, according to a documentary by Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney, it was part of a much bigger offensive against Iran known as Nitro Zeus.

Nitro Zeus involved hacking into masses of Iran's military and -- alarmingly -- civilian infrastructure, including its power grid and transport infrastructure, giving the ability for widespread damage and chaos ahead of any potential war. Iran had, in effect, already been invaded, and didn't even know it.

Russia's 2018 hacking efforts are nowhere near what they were in 2016 -- yet

We hear more about the online actions of our adversaries -- especially of Russia -- but there is a huge and constant online conflict, fueled by almost every nation state and with almost no rules of engagement.

Military actions in the real world are governed -- albeit far from perfectly -- by rules and by treaties, most notably the Laws of Armed Conflict.

There exists no equivalent in the online world, despite an obvious need for them. Early in the Obama administration, calls to develop such a code reached at least the desk of then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates. But the proposal went nowhere, perhaps in some part because the US didn't want to throw away its perceived online dominance.

The result is that we're all caught in the middle of a free-for-all that can only escalate as more and more critical systems move online.

Our governments and intelligence agencies are hopelessly conflicted. The same agencies in charge of securing the internet and our data are the ones also seeking to exploit those security standards in their offensive operations.

Russia is not the only country exploiting the confusing and often lawless nature of the internet -- they're just the clumsiest and least concerned about getting caught.

What we don't see should worry us far more than what gets caught and revealed. And until governments across the world rethink their current reckless online arms race, things can only get worse.

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