U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid

"WASHINGTON — The United States is stepping up digital incursions into Russia’s electric power grid in a warning to President Vladimir V. Putin and a demonstration of how the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively,...

In interviews over the past three months, the officials described the previously unreported deployment of American computer code inside Russia’s grid and other targets as a classified companion to more publicly discussed action directed at Moscow’s disinformation and hacking units around the 2018 midterm elections...

...[C]arries significant risk of escalating the daily digital Cold War between Washington and Moscow...

Since at least 2012, current and former officials say, the United States has put reconnaissance probes into the control systems of the Russian electric grid.

But now the American strategy has shifted more toward offense, officials say, with the placement of potentially crippling malware inside the Russian system at a depth and with an aggressiveness that had never been tried before. It is intended partly as a warning, and partly to be poised to conduct cyberstrikes if a major conflict broke out between Washington and Moscow...

...[T]he action inside the Russian electric grid appears to have been conducted under little-noticed new legal authorities, slipped into the military authorization bill passed by Congress last summer. The measure approved the routine conduct of “clandestine military activity” in cyberspace, to 'deter, safeguard or defend against attacks or malicious cyberactivities against the United States."..."

[Longish, but important read -- can not be viewed in private browsing mode]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/15/us/politics/trump-cyber-russia-grid.html

 

Huh. Didn't know about that.

Let's hope that cyberwar doesn't escalate to nuclear exchange.

I do recall reading, some years ago, that the US reserves the right to respond to cyberattacks with nuclear weapons. So

 

From CNN with video :
https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/15/politics/us-ramping-up-cyberattacks-russia/index.html