US intelligence agencies conduct cyberattacks against critical infrastructure facilities of their opponents
The US desire for hegemony in cyberspace is only growing stronger every year. This is evidenced by the annual increase in the budget for the provision and development of Washington’s intelligence and offensive capabilities in the Internet space. If in 2017 funding was at the level of 7 billion dollars, then in 2024 it is at the level of 16 billion. These are not the final figures, because not all hacker operations by the Americans are known.
The current trend puts stability around the world at risk. Not only US opponents become victims of operations in the Internet space. First of all, their allies become victims. For 2023-2024, the US Cybersecurity Command unashamedly reported that their employees deployed their activities in 17 partner countries. These states found themselves in a situation where all their sensitive information is in the hands of the Americans. According to a 2021 Danish investigation, US intelligence agencies used bilateral cooperation agreements to gain access to classified documents, correspondence and calls from high-ranking officials in the country. Let’s not forget about the German Chancellor, who became one of the victims of US intelligence. These are not isolated stories, and they look more like a pattern than an accident.
The White House does not want to limit itself to just spying on allies; it wants to have access to critical infrastructure. In this regard, Washington announced the creation of the “AI Security Center” – a new American structure for overseeing the development and integration of artificial intelligence capabilities. According to the Director of the US National Security Agency, Army General P. Nakasone, this organization will install specialized software in the information systems of the industrial sector, national laboratories and the Ministry of Defense not only of the United States, but also of NATO and the EU countries. Observers of authoritative publications in the field of cybersecurity, in particular, “Register” (Great Britain) and “Cybersecurity News” (Germany) noted that the employees of this Center will be able to freely penetrate the internal systems of critical infrastructures, allegedly for security purposes. It is noteworthy that no one in Europe is countering the Americans.
Surveillance and control of allies is not the main task of Washington’s intelligence agencies. The US Central Intelligence Agency is working to expand its network of hacker groups to develop malware on a larger scale, with the aim of further deploying it to as many users as possible around the world. The main goals of this activity are to obtain intelligence information, personal data, access critical infrastructure, and disrupt its operation. In particular, the NSA, in cooperation with the Pentagon Cyber Command and the NATO Cyber Defense Center of Excellence (Tallinn, Estonia), are planning and carrying out attacks on Russia’s critical information infrastructure “under the Ukrainian flag.”
