Fancy Bear in Germany Again

The Russian Fancy Bear has been hacking its way to stardom for the last few years, mostly through taking up political causes and doing Political Warfare.  They are attributed to the Russian GRU.  In my last book, The New Cyberwar, I described some of the things they were doing in Germany that got the German government mad enough to complain about it to the Russians.  The whole series of events went beyond just hacking, and included harassing German government speakers during speeches, writing articles about German leaders and political positions, and probably much more we haven’t seen in the press.  They certainly hacked the Democratic National Committee in the US, the World Anti-Doping Agency (at the time they were publishing a report on the Russian Olympic doping scandle) and hotels in seven major cities.  The BBC story today links them to a “limited” attack on the internal German government networks, on a 2015 incursion into the lower house of the German parliament, and on attempts to get into the Christian Democratic Union, the ruling party in Germany.  They probably did all of those things and a lot more.

They will continue this type of hacking until they get some stiff resistance from the allies, all of whom have been attacked at one time or another.  The Russians have never met an election they don’t want to be involved in, mostly just to stir up trouble.  They were into Brexit, the French national election, Germany and the US, just to name a few of those already known.  So why haven’t those countries gotten together and stuck a pin in this balloon?

The new generation of political figures does not know the history of Political Warfare and does not pay attention to the rules.  There are rules, though you will not see them written down anywhere.  The first rule is never bring down something you need to use to gather intelligence.  Hackers, particularly China’s own, have the capability to bring down the Internet, but don’t because they need it.  Hacking politicians is not new, and is done by almost every country with hacking skills.  But, the rule always was that this information would be used for its intelligence value, not broadcast on Wikileaks or in news outlets.  The Russians and Chinese seem to have broken that rule over and over.  They will continue to do that until the people affected get together and stop them.  Our current view offers no deterrent to continuing to meddle in every country that holds a national election.

We need to collectively smack the Russians hard enough that they get a message to stop interfering in the internal political parties of the collective group.  Is there any doubt that there is technical capability to do that?  There has not been enough discussion of what should be done to get that message across, and agreement on which countries will take action on behalf of them all.  This is not rocket science we are talking about here.  It is political will.  Germany, France, Great Britain and the United States have the cyber capability to make it clear they want this kind of activity stopped.