Jay's Expose

Around 7th grade, I realized I couldn’t go any longer without a laptop. My mom told me if I wanted one I could buy one, so I looked online for the best deal and found a package deal that included a decent laptop, a mouse, a case and free spyware protection. Little did I know that the spyware was one of the spies. A young and more naive version of myself had no idea that Kaspersky was a Russian multinational cyber security company that was known for doing more than simply protecting computers. As of now, they are just allegations, but it’s hard to trust a company with the task of ensuring your privacy with even the seed of doubt in their integrity. These days we all have to worry about cyber mischief. There was a game that was extremely popular a few years ago called Plague that involved trying to spread a disease as far as you could without being detected in order to wipe out the whole world. Cyber attacks work in a similar manner. The name of the game is to spread a virus without being detected so that when you activate it, its effects are harder to stop. A lot of people have the misconception that the US government doesn’t really know what goes on online, but they likely know more than they let on; after all, you can’t win a game by showing the opponent your cards.

The biggest difference between espionage, crime and war is whether or not we want the adversary to know who is attacking them. When you’re trying to spy and commit cyber crimes, anonymity is key. In the most recent US presidential election, Russia didn’t try to be covert in their involvement in creating conflict. They didn’t care that we knew what they were up to or about having decent tradecraft because it still had its destructive effect. In an overt intelligence operation, you are doing the opposite of being secretive or covert. In order to have quality cyber command, it is just important to defend the military works and to figure out how to effectively exploit the resources of the adversary.