> “Indeed, while the focus of US debate is more frequently on fears of a so-called ‘digital Pearl Harbor’, the more serious problem may actually be a long-term economic ‘death by a thousand cuts’.”

There's so much to unpack here, from parallels with the Cold War and discovery of the uncrossable lines on the path to mutually assured destruction, to plausible deniability and its impact on the ability of democratic states to reasonably react to and apply cyber warfare techniques with sovereign state opponents. We've been wondering how the future of cyberwarfare will play out for so long, and we're just now perhaps realizing that we are the boiling frog.

The main argument is that preventing a cyber Pearl Harbor is the wrong approach, however it offers little evidence that these styles of attacks have not been thwarted by the US’s approach to security policy.

It’s true that it underestimated social media trolling being a threat, but that’s orthogonal to whether or not effort should have been spent on stopping mass attacks.

It's like saying we don't need vaccines because we never hear about polio.

Cyber Pearl Harbor doesn't worry me nearly as much as Cyber Gulf of Tonkin.

The article takes the Russian "attack" in 2016 as given. The evidence is shaky at best that the Russians were in any way involved in leaking emails revealing the DNC's underhanded tactics to sideline Sanders.

As such, the article plays to the Cyber Gulf of Tonkin model.

>The evidence is shaky

Indeed, it is. The FBI said under oath that they did not get to do forensics on the server. The owner of CrowdStrike, the company which did have access, had a conflict of interest that was easily overlooked. CrowdStrike had to retract multiple claims made in their report.

Then there's the curous case of faked DNS logs which were meant to show communication between a Trump Tower server and a Russian bank.

I'm all for enhanced cybersecurity. In a government setting, I observed many attacks during my time on a cyber ops team for a couple years. These "Russian hacking" articles are however very political in nature. Assuming that the events most often reported about the DNC leaks are fact is foolhardy.

> The evidence is shaky at best

I think nothing will please the 'believers' except the personal Putin's apology. And of course they might say that was just his double speaking.

“During the two and a half decades leading up to the Russian cyber attacks on the 2016 U.S. presidential election ..”

You lost my interest right there ..

Mass vehicle hack during rush hour.