Their human intelligence is much better prepared to "convince" someone to act against their own interest if they can look at your last ten years of communication, family pictures, and web browsing history before they even meet you.
Imagine working in a foreign country where death penalty is applied to certain crimes, like blasphemy or homosexuality. They just need to find one person in the target organization who has a secret twitter account that talked badly about god and then they hit them up and tell them to plug in a certain USB stick to a certain system. Cyber operation succeeded because they have a shell.
Even when it comes to superiority of physical military forces, different people (with a range of different biases) have different opinions on stuff like whether a hot, all-out (but non-nuclear) war between USA and China would prove one or the other to be stronger, and while you may read that and think "I know which side is better and anyone who disagrees is just buying into delusional propaganda" at least to form that view you've had the ability to follow a lot of publicly available details on military developments over the years, learning about current and next gen fighter jets, drones, ships... etc.
But when it comes to cyber stuff, both offensive and defensive, it's generally a lot more secretive in terms of stuff that's actually been done (see for example the speculation in this thread that US power grid failures in recent years might have been caused by foreign adversaries - there's no evidence that's true, but if the US and China had both spent the last decade trying to take offline as many of the other country's power grids as possible we likely wouldn't have heard about it). Yet alone for hypothetical but saved for war capabilities. If a hot WW3 broke out tomorrow, who actually knows what hacking tools any country (from superpowers to smaller players) actually has, waiting to be used? Presumably they all spend a lot of effort trying to learn about each other's capabilities, and maybe they're successful enough that they actually do all know most of what everyone else can do - but they don't then announce that the way we hear about North Korea testing a new missile or about America developing a new fighter jet. I feel like we the general public just have no idea how advanced or not wartime capabilities might be. Am I wrong? (I may well be, as I'm in no way an expert in this field; I just believe that things like the document you linked are massively influenced by both the politics of the authors and the information available to them.)
Actually, poor countries can leverage cyber to pose a much bigger threat than they could traditionally.
Or in other words: Cyber can be used for asymmetric warfare. In relative terms, poor countries cause a lot more damage than rich ones.
Beijing tells Chinese firms to stop using US and Israeli cybersecurity software - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618949 - January 2026
I know 2 companies in that list that have done that very thing because otherwise it would have put their FedRAMP and CMMC pipelines at risk.
The country has its hands full enough coping with its state of quasi-chaos and belligerent nuclear-armed neighbors without taking on the worlds leading superpower for absolutely no reason at all.
Extraordinarily wrong on the first part.
Some countries have even outsourced some of their cyberattack capability to Indian companies in the past, and not for cost reasons.
Also: Why is India on your list? "Biggest", certainly, but in what way are they a threat?
> The power failures caused sporadic outbursts of looting and unrest, bringing the government close to collapse.
"why doesn't the US go after these hackers and designate targeting civilian infrastructure as a crime?"
To which the response was essentially "The US would like to reserve those types of cyber attacks for their own uses"
These quotes are very loose, I read it last year, but essentially, the US didn't make a stink about older grid attacks in order to save face when the US does it.
Additionally, much of VZ's difficulty was due to the massive sanctions against the nation. Sanctions are effectively attacks on a nation's citizens to pressure the government. Disabling power infrastructure is absolutely in-line with the motives of sanctions and embargos.
In this case, it fits squarely in with American foreign policy, especially their orientation towards Venezuelan chavismo.
IIRC both Texas and California had widespread power outages in the last few years. I am not convinced that US power grid is much better defended than the one in the EU.
Bare minimum it gives chinese tech suppliers a great pitch to convince buyers to choose their products over US suppliers. Even if theirs are also full of backdoors, at least they have no history of taking advantage of them to kidnap heads of state far away.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_crisis_in_Venezuela
> New construction on thermoelectric power plants and other hydroelectric plants has been stalled for years, and localised power cuts are a daily occurrence around Venezuela.
> There have also been problems with the supply from the Guri dam in the past.
> In 2010, Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, declared an “electricity emergency” after a drought caused by the El Niño weather phenomenon left waters at the dam dangerously low.
> Six years later, Venezuela’s worst drought in four decades again affected the Guri dam, which then provided about 70% of the country’s electricity.
> In May last year, a union leader representing workers in the state power corporation, was arrested by Venezuela’s intelligence service, Sebin, after warning that poor maintenance and systemic problems meant that a blackout was likely to happen.
I will use an extract from the Spanish Wikipedia article[2] about the 2019 blackouts because it summarizes the situation pretty well:
> On March 9, Ángel Javier Sequea, head of office and operations in Guyana, was found dead after being detained by SEBIN.[3] Ángel Javier left a recorded audio message about the lack of maintenance on high-voltage power lines. He worked for 13 years in the powerhouse next to the turbines at the Caruachi Plant.
> Between the night of March 11 and the early morning of March 12, 2019, SEBIN agents arrested and raided the Caracas home of journalist Luis Carlos Díaz, who was then transferred to the Helicoide.[4] Díaz was accused of inciting the blackout.[5] On the night of March 12, 2019, he was released after a hearing in the Caracas courts, in which, according to the organization Espacio Público, he was charged with the crime of “incitement to commit a crime” and was required to appear in court every eight days and prohibited from leaving the country, speaking to the media, and participating in public demonstrations[6]. On March 22, Francisco Alarcón Orozco, secretary of the Corpoelec union, was found hanged under strange circumstances[7]. Govany Zambrano, a Corpoelec worker, was arrested after participating in a press conference[8]. “Our infrastructure at the national level is in a state of neglect, vandalism, abandonment, and terrible conditions...” The government never accepted failure due to lack of maintenance as the main cause, as explained in 2010 by José Aguilar, an expert in electrical risk and international advisor[9].
As a Venezuelan, I can say that the national electrical system is in a terrible condition, with constant blackouts and power surges that damage household appliances and industrial equipment. Depending on the time of year, blackouts become more and more intense. It's very common to see news reports of areas that have lost power, and it can take weeks for CORPOELEC (the national electricity company) to fix the problem and depending on the location, even months.
No one here doubts that the blackouts of 2019 and all those that followed have been the government's fault due to lack of maintenance, failure to renew equipment, and failure to build new power plants.
Years ago, there were plans to install renewable energy sources such as windmills on the coast, but all the money disappeared thanks to the typical corruption around here[10].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/13/venezuela-blac...
[2] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apagones_de_Venezuela_de_2019
[3] https://www.aporrea.org/ddhh/n339228.html
[4] https://www.europapress.es/nacional/noticia-detenido-caracas...
[5] https://elpais.com/internacional/2019/03/12/actualidad/15523...
[6] https://www.elmundo.es/internacional/2019/03/13/5c888f29fc6c...
[7] http://www.venezuelaaldia.com/2019/03/23/muere-otro-trabajad...
[8] https://web.archive.org/web/20190713213240/http://puntodecor...
[9] https://web.archive.org/web/20100816181129/http://www.el-nac...
[10] https://climatetrackerlatam.org/historias/la-paralizacion-de...
