From: The Voice of Russia

NATO plans to hold its Cyber Coalition 2012 war games, the Kommersant business daily wrote Thursday. In line with the exercise’s scenario NATO members come under cyber attacks from an aggressor, which is described as “an African country”.

However, some NATO officials admit that the alliance is preparing to resist potential attacks by Russian, Iranian and Chinese hackers.

Recently, Russia’s Defense Ministry has announced a bid on IT security solutions, including ways to hack antivirus, cyber protection and software protection systems. The bid is to lure Russian IT whizz kids who want to work in the country’s interests. Experts told the VoR that defense officials are quite serious in their plans.

Russia is a well-prepared cyber rival due to its strong technical and math schools, IT expert Alexander Pisemsky told the VoR.

“I think that NATO needs to realize that Russia can be a strong cyber-aggressor as we always had lots of smart people here. Russia can also boast rapid IT and technological development, including state sector technologies.”

Russian hackers are notorious all over the world and Russia’s government understands all the risks so it wants to block cyber attacks and work out countermeasures. (end)

Cyber wars also comprise psychological attacks, for example the Arab Spring revolutions triggered bloody conflicts across the Middle East, says business development manager at Groteck company Alexander Vlasov.

“The Arab Spring cyber war was not about warfare only but about well-planned and large-scale campaigns by the unrest mastermidners. Cyber warfare in a broad sense includes all kinds of information attacks, like ideological wars and demoralization of potential rivals. Thus, ATO is still seeing Russia as an aggressor, this is the Cold War legacy. And it doesn’t matter whether they consider us cyber or real rivals.”

Such an assumption can be erroneous as the US should not be fearing its major dialogue partners. However, block thinking and messianic logic prevails and Americans train to fight against wind mills instead of real military and economic threats.