“So far, there is no evidence that the United States has actually turned off the power in any of the efforts to establish what American officials call a “persistent presence” inside Russian networks, just as the Russians have not turned off power in the United States.”
The NYT decision to frame these efforts as “attacks” rather than “infiltration” is certainly an interesting one. In essence, the U.S. has built a (digital) mutually-assured destruction deterrent. We wouldn’t refer to past nuclear drills or tests as “attacks” on Russia, so I find the use of that phrase here intriguing. I assume they simply borrowed the vocabulary of security researchers, knowing that it would mean something different to much of their readership.