Cyberfascism as a tool of war

Published at: 06/09/2024 07:00 PM

Cyberfascism is a strategy of intervention in Peoples that imperial countries use to maintain their global hegemony, through a silent but devastating war, which is not being waged on conventional battlefields, but in the minds of people and in digital networks. Recent reports on the impact of cyberwar, together with media manipulation strategies, reveal how powers use technology to distort reality, misinform, control and subdue sovereign nations that are interested in their natural resources.

In 2011 we saw how the US used this war strategy to justify the attack on Libya and the assassination of Gaddafi, when they staged a scene in the Green Square in Tripoli, with images of some supposed Libyan rebels who took the country's capital and toured all over the world, “we had to show the masses of rebels. That's why they built sets in Qatar two weeks earlier. We had that information, we knew that they had built decorations for the Green Square in Tripoli. They hired professional actors. Omar Jali played the role of Gaddafi's son, Seif el Islam, incredibly well. Everyone saw how the rebels were arresting the colonel's son,” said Marat Musin, member of the Committee for Solidarity with the Peoples of Syria and Libya for the RT website.

Ivan Zasursky, professor at Moscow State University, commented on this event that “we live in a time when many people have no trouble falsifying information. That is why everyone has to think with their own head and learn to discern. Nowadays it's impossible to believe what you see. The Internet has become an important part of armed conflicts. Information warfare is accompanied by real war,” also José Gabilondo, law professor at Florida International University, said that journalists lose their objectivity when they participate in the creation of a parallel reality, “we saw an intensification of the mediatization of the war during Operation Desert Storm. From that moment on, you realize that the border between the media and the real has been lost,” he explained in an interview conducted by AFP.

Cyberfascism, cyberwar, technological war or cyberterrorism refers to the use of digital attacks by a country to damage the most essential computer systems of another country, for which computer viruses can be used or computer hacking attacks can be carried out. The LISA Research Institute explained that it aims to find technical and technological vulnerabilities in the enemy's computer systems to attack them, obtaining sensitive data and information or simply to damage and destroy some of the most essential services.

This new form of attack has become a central element in Venezuela, in a context where computer attacks have not stopped since the presidential elections of last 28J, in a report presented by the Minister of Science and Technology, Gabriela Jiménez, during the Council of State and the Council for the Defense of the Nation On August 12, he warned the entire Venezuelan population of this scenario in which “the vulnerabilities of the national technological system are being exploited. Since July 28, basically all of the country's institutions have been under attack, including the Presidency of the Republic, the National Electoral Council (CNE), the Venezuelan National Anonymous Telephone Company (CANTV) and 25 other affected institutions and 40 more are currently under investigation,” said Jiménez.

According to research carried out by Misión Verdad, there are several analysts and computer technicians, including academic Víctor Theoktisto and technologist Kenny Ossa, who state that “this is an unprecedented cyberattack in the country. Not only because of its consequences, which are visible and are part of the coup agenda, but also because of the volume and multiplicity of the aggression”. This is why, to increase the levels of protection of the Venezuelan computer and technological system, President Nicolás Maduro created the National Cybersecurity Council on August 20.

In addition to cyberattacks, the Mission Truth investigation revealed the use of “manipulation techniques that range from the creation of fake news to the orchestration of disinformation campaigns, statements by influencers and artists, in order to generate internal divisions, manipulate public opinion and facilitate foreign intervention under the pretext of restoring democracy.” It is no coincidence that these tactics have intensified against our homeland to break the will of the Venezuelan people.

As mentioned before, in cyberfascism there is no institutionalized army as happens in traditional wars, but rather a State pays several hackers with great skills and knowledge in the field to destroy and cause damage to the enemy country through its computer systems. Their objective is to try to cause significant injuries to all the computer systems of those they consider to be their adversary.

Taking up the studies carried out by the LISA Research Institute, they detailed that depending on the hacker's abilities and the specific objectives pursued by the paying State, the weapons and tools used in cyberwars to achieve their end vary from very basic methods to other incredibly sophisticated ones.

Most of them are part of the usual tools of hackers, so attacks are usually relatively simple for them, but with a high degree of precision and in combination with other tools that make it difficult to defend against the attack. For example, for the offensive that Estonia suffered in 2007, a simple distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack was used.

The weapons most used in cyberwars are 2:

Ransomware: Ransomware, or data hijacking, is a type of harmful program that restricts access to certain parts or files of the operating system and asks for a ransom in exchange for removing this restriction. Not only is it used to make money by withholding data, but it can also be used to cause chaos. In a cyberwar, the use of ransomware designed to destroy information is very common.

DDoS attacks: A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, a type of cyberattack in which an attacker overloads a website, server, or network resource with malicious traffic. In these attacks, produced by means of malware, the vulnerabilities and faults of a computer equipment (normally not known to the user of the computer or the manufacturer) are exploited to make the system inaccessible. These flaws are highly prized by hackers because they know how to exploit them.

Minister Jiménez also highlighted that in the last two weeks there have been peaks of up to 30 million computer attacks per minute, a scale that matches what was stated by Ossa, who states that DDoS in Venezuela have reached peaks of 700 gigabytes per second, the largest offensive recorded compared to Google reports up to 2020.

Minister Jiménez also explained that the evidence showed that this is a repeated and complex cyberattack whose origin, at the beginning, was located in North Macedonia, where the cyber commands of the Pentagon and NATO operate without restrictions, however, as the computer analyst Theoktisto interpreted it, that country was only the “last point of departure” recorded, since “we know that this was only the” point of departure” recorded. a bridge for VPNs from other sides, in other words, the attackers were probably in another country but they used VPN networks or seized computers from North Macedonia to carry out the attack.”

Decision-making in this regard corresponds to a symmetric response to the agenda of María Corina Machado and Edmundo González Urrutia, who have taken advantage of the vulnerabilities of the Venezuelan computer system and Musk's financial support have carried out the cyberattacks that form one of the central areas of the coup plan still under development.

Faced with this declared attack, the Bolivarian Government created the National Cybersecurity Council, which deals with the formulation of policies that protect the technological infrastructure of institutional services. It is a continuous coup d'etat in which we see computer attacks that even go to the national electricity system, seeking to create a climate of ungovernability and that to face it, the Chavista Revolution is ready to emerge victorious once again.

AMELYREN BASABE/Mazo News Team