Information Warfare: Russia and Europe

Russia is known to commence information warfare tactics on different countries and they do it quite well because everyone just talks about it and no one does anything about it. A general from Russia noted that information warfare is much more powerful than physical warfare with weapons and it is much more effective. Some say that Russia has committed much information warfare on countries in Europe since information warfare became a plausible means for warfare in today’s world. Russia is addicted to controlling information in other countries and the main reason is that they crave power. They love to disseminate propaganda and sway the public opinion in their favor. However, not only has the use of propaganda benefited Russia in the new age of information warfare, but malicious attacks on other countries information infrastructures have taken place.

No one really knows if Russia is behind some of the malicious attacks on other countries. It could simply be someone framing Russia for attacks. In 2015, a broadcaster in France was attacked and taken offline and its resources were nearly destroyed. Russia was also blamed for a massive data breach in Germany’s parliament having acquired gigabytes of data. Bulgaria was attacked in 2016 and is said to be one of the biggest attacks in south Eastern Europe. I mentioned before the huge denial of service attack on Estonia that happened a while back that Russia had commenced, disabling Estonia’s web sites. The Estonian officials compare the Russian attacks on their infrastructure to the September 11 attacks on the United States, even though I think that is a little too extreme. The Russians supposedly even did an attack on a Ukrainian power plant in 2015 that lead to days of a blackout. Luckily, it was just a blackout and not a major problem like a meltdown which really concerns me with all of the information warfare going on these days I hope that it will not hurt any people.

Even though Russia denies any of these attacks, all parties involved are pointing fingers in the direction of Russia. Russia’s information warfare abilities are becoming more and more advanced in the world today especially with the quickly evolving information infrastructures of the world. That could be one of the reasons that president trump is trying to have good relations with Russia, which I think is a good idea. If the United States and Russia teamed up, they could be powerful allies in the conquest of information warfare and even possibly bring peace to the whole world. Information warfare is quickly replacing physical warfare and I think that is a great thing. Instead of a game of Russian roulette where a person are critically injured we could all just settle for a game of chess.

source : https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39401637