LThe US Secretary of State accuses Russia of: ” An evidence “, Mike Pompeo said. So far, the president has remained silent: Donald Trump has always spared Vladimir Putin. But White House advisers also point to a responsibility “Russian”. Joe Biden, the president-elect, without accusing anyone by name, evokes the need for a response.
Discovered in recent days, the computer espionage affair of which the United States has been victims is likely to further poison relations between Moscow and Washington. The exceptional scale that is attributed to it would make it one of the biggest intelligence blows of the century. Only one state has been able to carry out such an operation, or one of the star mafias of cybercrime, says Nicolas Mazzucchi of the Foundation for Strategic Research (FRS).
It’s a business of geeks. We are far from the tormented universe of the spy masters who populate the novels of John le Carré. Nowadays, agents hardly cross from one border to another, moral or geographical. They operate in cyberspace, this “place” that is out of bounds, intangible, and that no rule seems to govern. Today, George Smiley, one of the legendary heroes of Le Carré, would be chief programmer. Tormented, he would ask himself: can we do everything in cyberspace? When does espionage lead to outright aggression?
Millions of data
Honesty calls for caution. “We never speak of Western incursions into the Chinese or Russian systems ”, says American political scientist Robert Dujarric. In Washington, those who provide information to the press have their reasons, he continues: to increase the share of a public budget, to extol the merits of a computer security company.
As Martin Untersinger explains in The world from December 20-21, the hackers went through an American software provider, SolarWinds. A computer systems management firm, its clients are a good part of the federal government, including the Pentagon, and a number of large American companies. Hackers have tricked one of SolarWinds’ common programs. By clicking on the “update” window, customers, private and public, let in a spy virus of the nastiest kind. It happened in March. Hackers have had ten months to examine millions of pieces of data.
And undoubtedly it will be necessary “Months if not years to establish the extent of the damage”, continues Nicolas Mazzucchi. “Still, we can only rely on the statements of victims », He says, who, to preserve a stock market price or the reputation of a public service, may have an interest in undervaluing. SolarWinds would be espionage, not sabotage. In the 2010s, Americans and Israelis used destruction software, Stuxnet, to dismantle part of Iran’s nuclear program. It was an act of war.
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