WESTERN SECURITY

RUSSIA’S tentacles of sinister cyber operations are snaking out across the globe and pose the gravest of threats to Western security and democracy.

Recent revelations expose the sheer scale, breadth and audacity of the Kremlin-backed plots – and our vulnerability to this new brand of warfare.

Among those who were targeted were a British television network, the Democratic Party in America, public transport hubs in Ukraine, the US engineering giant Westinghouse, and the World Anti-Doping Agency based in Montreal – apparently hacked in a brazen act of revenge for showing Russia’s systematic abuse of the testing regime at the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014.

Perhaps the most disturbing of all, however, was the unsuccessful attacks on our own soil – at the Foreign Office and Porton Down – and the foiled attempts by four Russian agents to hack the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in the Hague.

The OPCW is continuing to conduct investigations into the Salisbury novichok poisonings and the use of banned weapons by the Russian-backed Assad regime in Syria.

About a dozen or so “cyber-actors” have been identified as responsible, but they are all fronts for the GRU – the Russian military intelligence unit also implicated in the attempted assassination of former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter.

Given are dependence on computers, its coordinated attacks have huge implications. Everything from cash machines to home heating systems, from electricity generators to mobile phones, and to the health service which is relying more on cyber technology. We have seen many times in recent years the enormous disruption caused by a temporary breakdown in service, as happened during the botched IT upgrade at the TSB bank.

Similarly, 18 months ago the NHS was hit by a major cyber problem, prompting the mass cancellations of appointments and operations. Then the North Korean government of Kim Jong-Un was cynical enough to take the blame and the fear inspired by that. But it is clear, from the wealth of mounting evidence, that the Russians certainly have the capability and determination to launch similar attacks.

If patients’ lives were put at risk by such a cyber-attack, it would create a real global panic – the cyber equivalent of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

That is why we should be worried. What is happening now in cyberspace is even more dangerous and certainly more unpredictable than the darkest days of the Cold War.

For all the anxieties back then about a nuclear stand-off, at least the hostility between the West and the Soviet Bloc was governed by respected boundaries. The rules – such as a prohibition on assassinations – were generally upheld. Both sides communicated with each other, partly from the need to avoid a nuclear apocalypse through a catastrophic misunderstanding.

That culture has disappeared. We live in a much more fluid world where restrictions on movement – especially in Europe – hardly exist at all. At any given moment there are probably more than 100,000 Russians in Britain, most of them wholly innocent and here to work, study or by enjoying a break. Yet that transient mass also provides cover for hostile intelligence agents.

Moreover, technology makes it much easier for someone to cause mayhem. During the Cold War, if the Soviets wanted to hit a water pumping station or sabotage an aircraft, they had to send in armed agents. Today, that could be accomplished from an office in Moscow or Kiev – just as computer programs can churn out millions of emails to damage businesses, influence elections and propagate fake news and untruths.

Then there are the armies of hackers in “troll” factories who spread and disseminate destabilising information, such as Hillary Clinton’s emails or the intricate medical details of Olympic cyclist Bradley Wiggins’ asthma prescriptions. The aim is to undermine public respect for Western politicians and heroes alike.

The fall of the Berlin Wall almost three decades ago was a remarkable triumph for freedom and capitalism over totalitarianism. But that ascendency lulled Western politicians into a false sense of security.

Russia, which has an economy no bigger than that of Britain or France, is showing almost by the day that if resources are focused on a certain area – in this case cyber warfare – then a nation can still have lethal power.

And we are only just coming to terms with it. Lord Ricketts, who served as Britain’s National Security Adviser until 2012, has warned that the recent plots are just the start, “pilot projects” to test defences in advance of a full-blooded cyber assault to bring anarchy to the West.

As President Putin’s invasion of Crimea and his support for the blood-soaked Assad regime in Syria has shown, he is not a man constrained by normal democratic values. Throughout his presidency he has been pushing at boundaries, seeing what he can get away with, what will provoke the West to act.

Now his dwindling popularity at home over his domestic agenda – particularly his attempt to raise the retirement age – makes it all the more imperative for him to wrap himself in the nationalist flag with high-profile attacks on the West.

AT least the complacency in Europe and America is beginning to lift and we are starting to fight back – such as when the Dutch defence minister, Ank Bijeveld, and Peter Wilson, the British ambassador to the Netherlands, explained how the OPCW conspiracy was foiled.

In the context of cyber warfare, the West has unparalleled expertise. The staff of both the US National Security Agency and our own formidable base at GCHQ in Cheltenham have world-beating abilities in hacking computers and other electronic devices.

So far, the West has proved far more restrained than Russia in deploying that expertise. There is only one documented case of Western agents using a computer against an enemy state’s infrastructure. That occurred when the Israelis and the Americans worked together to release the Stuxnet virus into the computers that operated Iran’s nuclear programme. It proved what the West can do if necessary.

But any escalation in cyber warfare is fraught with risk. A miscalculation by any rogue agents, anxious to ingratiate themselves with the Kremlin, could have disastrous consequences.

The reality of the new world disorder is one in which Putin is not only promoting, but relishing. We would do well to remember that.