By Jon Harris:
A few days ago, Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu confirmed the existence of “information troops,” rumored for years but long denied by officials. “Propaganda must be smart, literate and effective,” he told the lower house of parliament. Russia spends $300m annually on its “cyber army” of about 1,000 people, according to the Kommersant business newspaper.
Andrei Soldatov, the co-author of The Red Web, says the Kremlin has long seen cyber security as part of a broader concept of information warfare. According to Soldatov, “They believe they are under some siege. They believe that they lost the first Chechen war thanks to journalists, so when they are in a crisis, the first thing they need to do is control the information space.”
When pressed, Retired Gen. Vladimir Shamanov, the head of defense affairs committee in the lower house of the Russian parliament, was equally vague, saying that the information warfare troops’ task is to “protect the national defense interests and engage in information warfare,” according to the Interfax news agency.
“The information operations forces have been established and are expected to be a far more effective tool than everything we were using before for counter-propaganda purposes,” Shoigu said in a speech addressing Russia’s military modernization, according to Russia’s TASS news agency.
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It was April 9, 2015, TV5Monde, the world’s largest francophone broadcaster, began shutting down and not by choice. Screens and systems in the massive headquarters of the broadcasting network were going blank. The TV network’s servers were under cyber attack and being erased one after another. The attack, thought to have been the work of Islamic terrorists, was instead the responsibility of a group known as APT 28. They were Russian.
The next year, Spring, 2016, APT 28 would initiate the attack and hack of the US Democratic National Committee (DNC). The hack resulted in the exposure of thousands of files to discredit Hillary Clinton and calling into question the entire democratic election system.
France and Germany both have elections this year and APT 28 already compromised the data security of the political parties. Since the DNC hack, dozens of non-governmental organizations and aid agencies working in Syria, including those providing information about casualties, have been the target of hacking, according to a senior Western security official. Russia claims its forces in Syria are fighting terrorism.
The public announcement of Russia’s new information warfare forces comes less than two months after the US intelligence community released a report concluding that Russia engaged in a cyber and disinformation campaign to influence the US presidential election. The question is why APT 28 shifted from years of covert intelligence gathering to a riskier operation of aggression, sabotage, and manipulation.
Kremlinologists and the western intelligence community are still divided on the timing of Russia’s altered course in relations with the West. Some observers date it to Kiev’s Maidan Revolution in 2014 and subsequent invasion of eastern Ukraine. Others see a slower-burning breakdown, with Moscow’s paranoia exacerbated by years of freewheeling US foreign policy and enthusiasm for regime change. An even smaller group see an ever wider arc in which Russia is reasserting its Soviet, even Tsarist, geopolitical behavior.
Whichever answer is correct, one thing is painfully evident. Russia’s information warfare operations must be countered. The US is behind in this effort. The digital advantage may very well have shifted to Russia, and in that light, Putin has a new weapon in his arsenal.
Jon Harris is an OpsLens contributor and former Army NCO, civilian law enforcement officer, and defense contractor with over 30 years in the law enforcement community. He holds a B.S. in Government and Politics and an M.S. in Criminal Justice.
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