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Comment by jszymborski | Hacker News Reader

Something I've been thinking a lot about is that news of nation states attacking NATO member systems often make headlines, but there is little about NATO members attacking these same nation states.

This sort of results in an impression that there is a capability asymmetry between the two. Is that true? Or do we just not hear about it.

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There is no asymmetry in capability but there is an asymmetry in the desire to provoke. Russia has solidified its role in the world as essentially - a geopolitical troll. "Stabbing in the back", the thing they accuse everyone else of, is the strategy.

NATO does not want this fight, and they do not have the hierarchy of plausible deniability, which the Russian security services have perfected to a form of art.

"Independent" hacking groups do jobs for the government, in exchange to freely conduct mercenary for-profit attacks without fear of being jailed.

NATO countries don't have this system. If they do something, they do it without proxies.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/01/dutch...

> There is no asymmetry in capability but there is an asymmetry in the desire to provoke.

Or asymmetry in the desire to report it. Any country reports threats against them wide and far, and they downplay or ignore any threatening actions they make.

> NATO countries don't have this system. If they do something, they do it without proxies.

Colour me skeptical. "Open and transparent" is just not how intelligence services operate.

Intelligence agencies obviously rarely do PR. Give one example of a NATO hacking "proxy" getting caught. There have been multiple Russian ones.

No asymmetry, we only hear about it when successful. One thing to also keep in mind is that intelligence organizations like the CIA typically work through intermediaries such that a cybercrime organization in South Korea may not know they’re executing an attack on China on behalf of the CIA — they may have already wanted to do so for their own reasons and the CIA just made sure they found the right info to execute it.

The Chinese media would label such an attack as a US hack on China, while the US media would report it as a Korean hack on China (meaning you probably never hear about it at all unless you’re in the business).

Do you have any links to events that you would suspect of being of the described nature: done by crime actors and described as done by any nato state by some non nato state?

I’m only aware of this happening the other way round (.ru crime actors doing things Moscow needs done, ddos on Estonia etc etc)

I’d love to read more on this.

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