"Cyberwarfare and the Extension of the Cold War: Late 2000s-2010s, the Dawn of the Digital Cold War."

"Cyberwarfare and the Extension of the Cold War: Late 2000s-2010s, the Dawn of the Digital Cold War."

Even after the end of the Cold War, Russia maintained its tradition of information warfare and increasingly viewed cyberspace as a strategic battlefield, led by the General Directorate of Intelligence of the General Staff of the Armed Forces (GRU) from the late 2000s. The symbolic example is the intrusion into the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, where tens of thousands of emails were leaked, exposing internal conflicts and influencing the election campaign. The GRU's activities were based on the propaganda warfare of the former Soviet Union, but combined with hacking and social networking operations to create a hybrid form of information warfare that has brought new tensions to international politics. It has brought about new tensions in international politics. In the background, the deteriorating U.S.-Russian relations over the Ukraine issue and NATO expansion led to the 2007 cyber attack on Estonia, which prompted European cou
ntries to increase their vigilance; NATO established a cyber defense center and began to integrate the cyber domain into its national security; and the U.S. and Russia have been engaged in a series of cyber attacks against the U.S. and Russia. Russia, on the other hand, used cyber attacks as a "cheap, asymmetric force" to compensate for its military inferiority. This composition, dubbed the "Digital Cold War," represented a new confrontation in which information and data replaced the nuclear deterrence of the past. Cyberwarfare transcended invisible boundaries, shaking up everyday life and democratic institutions themselves, and morphed into an extension of Cold War-style confrontation in the modern era.