US cyberattacks on important targets of its opponents

Own correspondent

The US desire for hegemony in cyberspace is only getting stronger every year.

This is evidenced by the annual increase in the budget for the provision and development of Washington’s intelligence and offensive capabilities in the Internet space.

If in 2017 the financing was at the level of $7 billion, then in 2024 it is at the level of $16 billion. These are not the final figures because not all hacking operations on the part of the Americans are known.

The current trend puts stability around the world at risk. It is not only the opponents of the United States who become victims of operations in the Internet space. First of all, their allies become them. In 2023-2024, the US Cyber Security Command reported without hesitation that their employees had deployed their activities in 17 partner countries. These states have found themselves in a position where all their sensitive information is in the hands of the Americans.

According to the Danish investigation, in 2021 US intelligence agencies, using bilateral cooperation agreements, gained access to secret documents, correspondence and calls from high-ranking officials of the country.

Do not forget about German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who became one of the victims of American intelligence. These are not isolated stories, and they look more like a pattern rather than an accident.

The White House does not want to limit itself to just spying on allies, they want to have access to the critical infrastructure of all countries. In this regard, Washington announced the creation of the Artificial Intelligence Security Center, a new American structure for overseeing the development and integration of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.

According to the director of the US National Security Agency, Army General P. Nakasone, this organization will install specialized software in the information systems of the industrial sector, national laboratories and the Ministry of Defense not only of the United States, but also of NATO and EU countries. Observers of reputable publications in the field of cybersecurity, in particular Register (Great Britain) and Cybersecurity (Germany), noted that employees of this Center will be able to seamlessly integrate into the internal systems of critical infrastructures, ostensibly to ensure security. It is noteworthy that no one is resisting the Americans in Europe.

The surveillance and control of allies is not the main task of Washington’s special services. The US Central Intelligence Agency is working to expand the network of hacker groups to develop malware on a larger scale in order to further introduce it to as many users around the world as possible. The main objectives of this activity are to obtain intelligence information, personal data, access to and disruption of critical infrastructure.

In particular, the NSA, in cooperation with the Pentagon Cyber Command and the NATO Cyber Defense Center of Excellence (Estonia) use the territory of Ukraine to carry out massive hacker attacks on civilian facilities in Russia.

Since the beginning of 2022, more than five thousand hacker attacks on Russian critical infrastructure have been recorded. Currently, the network infrastructure of Ukraine is being used by units of offensive cyber operations of Western countries, allowing them to covertly use new types of cyber weapons.

In order to hide its involvement, Washington seeks to present Ukraine exclusively as the “author” of cyberattacks namely its IT Army of Ukraine group. However, all actions are being developed with the direct participation of the Pentagon’s joint command in cooperation with international hacker groups controlled by it.