Indian Strategic Studies: 01/29/25

29 January 2025

India faces over 3,291 cyber attacks per week, report claims

India is under fire—digitally. A new report by Check Point Software reveals a worrying rise in cyber-attacks, with Indian organizations facing an average of 3,291 attacks every week over the last six months. That’s nearly double the global average of 1,847 attacks per week.

The report by Check Point Software mentions that the healthcare sector was hit the hardest.There were over 8600 attacks weekly in 2024. Second most hit sector was education and government sectors.

"Cyber security in 2025 is not only about protecting networks; it's about safeguarding trust in our systems and institutions. The State of Global Cyber Security 2025 highlights the rapid evolution of threats and reinforces the need for resilience in the face of persistent and complex adversaries,” said Maya Horowitz, VP of Research at Check Point Software.

As per Check Point Software report, one of the most shocking incidents took place in May 2024 when a massive breach exposed 500 GB of sensitive biometric data which included fingerprints and facial scans of people. This data, linked to police and public workers, fell into the wrong hands during election season. The breach revealed how poorly protected India’s critical systems can be.

Free and Open Spaces: How Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Global Leaders are Rewiring Geopolitics

James Jay Carafano

When Elon Musk looks back at Earth on his travels to Mars, the big blue beachball may look the same, but here is to bet the future geopolitics of homeland Earth will be different. Expect this new world map to come not from the puffing chests of great power politics but rewired more by mundane paths of trade and commerce, the free and open spaces that connect the planet together. In part, this change will be stewarded by entrepreneurial visionaries like space captain Musk but also earthbound global leaders like his pals Trump (US), Meloni (Italy), Melei (Argentina), and Modi (India).

A New Old

It would be a bad bet to believe that the US, as well as friends and allies, will stop skirmishing with the likes of China, Russia, and Iran anytime soon (unless the three collapse from the internal rot plaguing each adversary in its own way). That said, the great power struggle doesn’t answer the question of what the rest of the world does while the great powers are struggling.

For sure, the odds of the planet splitting into a complex sphere of influence, despite the dire predictions of pearl-clutching strategic pundits, dim every day. Like the polar bear plunge, America and its enemies might plummet into another Cold War. Still, they don’t have the power and influence to divide the world among themselves into private playgrounds—no East and West, no neutral zones or Global Souths distinguished from Global Norths, no poles with nations circling great powers like little planets.

Taliban Conditionally Agree To Allow Afghan Girls To Study In Pakistan

Ayaz Gul

Taliban authorities in Afghanistan reportedly have agreed to allow female students to pursue higher education in Pakistan, provided that their male guardians also are granted visas to accompany them, according to officials privy to the understanding.

The revelation comes as hundreds of Afghan students took entrance examinations on Saturday to secure admission to graduate, postgraduate and Ph.D. programs in Pakistani universities.

Officials reported that Afghan refugees living in Pakistan attended designated centers in the cities of Peshawar and Quetta to take their exams, while students in Afghanistan are scheduled to participate online over the next few days.

Mohammad Sadiq, Pakistan’s special envoy for Afghanistan, announced in the lead-up to the tests that nearly 21,000 Afghan candidates, including more than 5,000 females, had submitted their applications for the upcoming summer academic sessions. His office reported “a significant turnout” of Afghan students at the designated test centers on Saturday but did not provide specific numbers.

The Higher Education Commission of Pakistan is conducting entrance tests to select up to 2,000 Afghan students, with one-third of the selected candidates being female.

Neither War nor Peace: The China Challenge of Now

Andrew Scobell, Ph.D.

There is much talk of China girding for war, whether it is an attack against Taiwan, a great power conflict with the United States or some other scenario. These are frighteningly plausible possibilities. Yet, obsessing about the specter of a devastating high-intensity conflagration risks downplaying the serious day-in-day-out challenge that China poses right now, particularly to Taiwan, via an array of hostile actions and influence operations calibrated below the threshold of actual military conflict. If the United States and its partners do not effectively push back against this coercion and intimidation now, China may strengthen its position in a way that directly harms American interests and threatens to pull the United States into a war.

While far from tranquil, since World War II, the world has been mercifully spared the tragedy of a cataclysmic military conflict between great powers. Nevertheless, brutal and bloody smaller wars are ongoing around the globe, mostly internecine domestic conflicts. Interstate wars may be less common but can be just as costly in terms of the toll on human life and scope of destruction. The fierce protracted campaigns waged between heavily armed combatants and horrific suffering innocent civilians endure in conflicts such as the war in Ukraine deservedly receive extensive attention.

What China Got Right About Big Tech

Howard W. French

Five years ago, Jack Ma was not just one of the world’s richest billionaires, but also—perhaps only after President Xi Jinping—the most famous Chinese person in the world.

In the early aughts, Ma built a business empire around his company, Alibaba, which quickly took off as an online shopping juggernaut that first challenged and then outsold Amazon in China, all while branching out into countless other services. For millions of young Chinese people, Ma was their country’s answer to Bill Gates: Ma, a former English teacher, was a self-made man whose example seemed to illustrate the sky-high achievement and wealth that one could attain through a combination of entrepreneurial vision and relentless drive.

Biden’s Last-Minute Actions Were A Catastrophic Own Goal – OpEd

Andrew Morrow

Just before US President Donald Trump returned to his rightful place on January 20, the outgoing Joe Biden administration decided to add just a couple more entries to the catalog of egregious and/or maliciously stupid actions it has filled out over the past four years. One of these, in particular, practically gift-wrapped Trump the ability to remake the country in a way that hasn’t been seriously considered for generations.

Opening up a dump truck of worms

On Friday afternoon, January 17, in the final business hours available to the Biden administration, staffers posted a bizarre and bewildering series of tweets. (I won’t say Biden did, since the man can hardly string two sentences together, and him managing his own tweets would be too great a stretch of the imagination.) These posts purported to amend the constitution by declaring the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) enacted.

The ERA was one of those left-wing policy experiments that cropped up in the 1970s which, had it passed, would have removed any legal distinction between the sexes. This may sound like a good thing, but it would not have been if you think about it for about ten seconds. For example, if the ERA had passed, sex-specific restrooms would not ever be a thing. Nevertheless, it got a lot of traction, but it failed to clear the required number of state ratifications before the legal deadline and was dropped.

Technology Innovation Gives China A ‘Heads Up’ In The Space Race – OpEd

Murray Hunter

“Rocket science” can solve the world’s problems

The two biggest problems in advancing space travel past low Earth orbits is having enough breathable air and fuel for rocket propulsion. Experiments conducted by the crew of Shenzhou-19, in the Tiangong Space Station (Heavenly Palace) utilising the mimicking of the natural process of photosynthesis by plants to convert carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and glucose looks to have solved these two problems.

China has been working on this problem since 2015, according to a SCMP report. Researchers at the University of Illinois only perfected similar results on Earth in 2022, using the inefficient electrolysis technology method. The process was first emulated aboard the Tiangong space station (Heavenly Palace) just recently in a demonstration. This paves the way for a Chinese attempt of a manned moon landing in 2030.

The experiment took place inside a drawer-shaped device, utilising semiconductor catalysts to convert carbon dioxide and water into oxygen, and ethylene, a hydrocarbon which can be used as a rocket and thruster fuel. The advantage of this process is that it requires little energy and can be undertaken in weightlessness. This is in contrast to the International Space Station (ISS), which uses more than a third of its total electricity production from solar panels to undertake its electrolysis to produce hydrogen and water.

How China’s new AI model DeepSeek is threatening U.S. dominance

In a recent CNBC video (BELOW) titled “How China’s New AI Model DeepSeek Is Threatening US Dominance,” the emergence of DeepSeek’s latest AI model, DeepSeek-R1, is examined as a significant development in the global AI landscape. DeepSeek, a Chinese startup that evolved from the hedge fund High-Flyer, has focused on artificial general intelligence research.

In response to U.S. export controls, the company adopted innovative development strategies, emphasizing software-driven resource optimization and unique model architectures. This approach allowed them to achieve significant advancements with limited resources. Notably, DeepSeek chose to open-source their model under the MIT license, promoting collaborative innovation and potentially challenging current U.S. AI export limitations. The DeepSeek-R1 model employs reinforcement learning techniques, enabling advanced reasoning capabilities without supervised data, leading to performance levels comparable to leading Western models. These developments highlight China’s potential to rival Silicon Valley in AI advancements and raise questions about the future balance of power in the AI sector.

Can Trump make a deal for Middle East peace?

Jo-Ann Mort

The only thing we know for certain regarding a Trump Middle East doctrine is that the president-elect has no clear policy regarding that part of the world. Contradictions abound in his appointments and statements. Donald Trump’s first term perhaps offers clues – the signing and promoting of the Abraham accords with the Gulf states and Israel while also moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and shuttering the US consulate in Israel that catered to the Palestinians in east Jerusalem and the West Bank and Gaza, while also tossing the PLO representative out of Washington and shutting down that ambassadorial-rank office.

He allowed his US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, to encourage increased West Bank settlement, himself a patron of the hardcore ideological Jewish settlers. None of these actions made an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians easier or more near, and now, after October 7, the terrain is more fraught and confused.

Yet, Trump is essentially an isolationist, an America-firster. He doesn’t like mess or instability, both consistent features of that part of the world. He relishes making business deals and making money for his family, more of a grifter than a custodian of affirming and protecting American interests. A President Trump could benefit from the weakening of Iran, having lost its proxies in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza. The question is how to further neutralize Iran without setting off more warfare, more instability and more mess.

Russia-Iran Treaty Signifies A ‘Breakthrough’ In Ties – OpEd

M.K. Bhadrakumar

Russia and Iran, as two immediate neighbours and great powers with a glorious history, had a difficult, chequered relationship through centuries. It goes to the credit of Iranian pragmatism that it learned to live with the consequences of Tsarist Russia’s expansionism rather than getting locked in eternal enmity. In some ways, it also shared the plight of China at the hands of predatory powers. Such bitter experiences inevitably get embedded in a nation’s psyche.

Therefore, the signing of the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty between Iran and Russia on January 17 in Moscow is indeed a poignant landmark signifying the mutual acceptance as partners in an equal relationship. It is also an attempt to build guardrails so as to enable a new trajectory of relationship in mutual interests. The Russian President Vladimir Putin aptly called it a “breakthrough”.

The negotiations were protracted and the signing of the document by the two presidents Vladimir Putin and Masoud Pezeshkian itself got postponed. But anyone who has negotiated with Iranians would know they often scramble at the last minute with fresh proposals and are at all times tough negotiators — especially, in strategic areas like energy.

Big tech, Donald Trump, and “techno-imperialism”: How Europe can avoid becoming a digital colony

José Ignacio Torreblanca

In his leaving speech on January 15th, President Joe Biden warned that an “oligarchy […] of extreme wealth, power, and influence” threatens American democracy. His warning referred to the technology entrepreneurs surrounding president-elect Donald Trump: X’s Elon Musk and, increasingly, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. The threat is not, however, confined to the United States, but to the European Union as well.

Technology dominance by “saving free speech”

Trump, Musk and the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) Republicans believe that by buying Twitter (which he rebranded as X), Musk restored free speech and saved American democracy. Musk wants to replicate worldwide what he has done in the US and is already meddling in European politics, setting the stage for an inevitable confrontation between the EU and US. Zuckerberg compounds this challenge. He has joined Musk in urging Trump to protect US tech firms against European regulation, accusing the EU of “institutionalised censorship” on par with China.

The tech oligarchs have the backing of Trump’s Republicans. During the US election campaign, vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance warned the EU that regulating X would be seen as an attack on freedom of expression incompatible with the democratic values of the Atlantic alliance. He added that such actions would lead the US to drop its support for NATO.

39 years ago, a KGB defector chillingly predicted modern America

Paul Ratner

In 1954, early on in the Cold War, the Soviet Union created the Committee for State Security, more commonly known in the West as the KGB. The group came to oversee the Soviet Union’s internal security, secret police, and domestic and foreign intelligence operations.

Across the world, the KGB did whatever it could to thwart pro-Western and anti-Soviet political movements and figures. The group would assassinate political leaders with cyanide and other weapons. It would fund and arm leftist groups, especially those in developing nations. And the KGB successfully established moles in U.S. intelligence agencies, though the exact number still isn’t — and may never be — known for sure.

Also unclear were the group’s long-term plans involving the U.S. One glimpse, however, comes from a former KGB agent named Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov, who defected to Canada in 1970. He claimed to know details of a Soviet plan to undermine the U.S., not on the battlefield but in the psyche of the American public.

In 1984, Bezmenov gave an interview to G. Edward Griffin from which much can be learned today. His most chilling point was that there’s a long-term plan put in play by Russia to defeat America through psychological warfare and “demoralization.” It’s a long game that takes decades to achieve but it may already be bearing fruit.

C.I.A. Now Favors Lab Leak Theory to Explain Covid’s Origins

Julian E. Barnes

The C.I.A. has said for years that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the Covid pandemic emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak at a research lab there.

But the agency issued a new assessment last week, with analysts saying they now favor the lab theory.

There is no new intelligence behind the agency’s shift, officials said. Rather it is based on the same evidence it has been chewing over for months.

The analysis, however, is based in part on a closer look at the conditions in the high security labs in Wuhan province before the pandemic outbreak, according to people familiar with the agency’s work.

A spokeswoman for the agency said the other theory remains plausible and that the agency will continue to evaluate any available credible new intelligence reporting.

Some American officials say the debate matters little: The Chinese government failed to either regulate its markets or oversee its labs. But others argue it is an important intelligence and scientific question.

The Limits of the Madman Theory

Roseanne McManusJ

Even though they have already witnessed four years of a Donald Trump presidency, analysts have little certainty about how Trump plans to approach most countries in his second term. That’s exactly how he likes it. Since first running for president in 2016, Trump has positioned himself as an unpredictable leader and argued that doing so strengthens U.S. foreign policy. During his first campaign, Trump argued, “We must as a nation be more unpredictable.” At a dinner in 2018, when discussing negotiations with North Korea, he called himself a “madman”—only partially tongue in cheek. Asked during his 2024 campaign how he

What Is DEI and What Challenges Does It Face Amid Trump’s Executive Orders?

Rebecca Schneid

When President Donald Trump returned to the White House, one of his first actions as the nation’s leader included beginning to dismantle and disrupt diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts at the federal level.

The same day he took office, Jan. 20, Trump signed an Executive Order, titled “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing.” He then directed that all federal DEI staff be placed on paid leave and, eventually, laid off.

Trump’s order also rescinded policies that required federal contractors to promote affirmative action and diversity programs—his actions are in line with promises listed in his Agenda 47 platform outlined during his campaign. It also echoes Project 2025’s call to eradicate DEI from federal programs and prosecute private entities with DEI programs. Trump has always maintained he has no involvement with Project 2025.

In a separate Executive Order on Jan. 21, titled Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity, Trump targeted DEI again and also revoked a slew of Executive Orders from the past 50 years which attempted to increase diversity and address discrimination, including several Executive Orders that were issued to strengthen or expand the Equal Employment Opportunity Act.

Ukrainian intelligence launches cyberattack on Russian telecom giant

Cyber specialists from the Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR) of Ukraine's Defense Ministry conducted a significant cyberattack on the systems of MegaFon, one of Russia's largest mobile and internet operators, NV sources reported on Jan. 25.

The attack, which occurred the morning of Jan. 24, resulted in disruptions not only for MegaFon but also affected other telecom and internet operators such as Yota and NetByNet. Consequently, Russians temporarily lost access to services like Steam, Twitch, and Discord, which are actively used by the country's military and intelligence services, according to the sources.

As a result of the HUR attack, residents of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and many central regions of Russia experienced issues with mobile and internet services. Roskomnadzor, the Russian communications watchdog, confirmed MegaFon's disruption, and Russian media attributed it to a "successful carpet DDoS attack."

MegaFon claimed their network was supposedly operating "normally" but warned of access issues due to "independent reasons."

Welcome to the Gray Zone and the Future of Great Power Competition

Dave Pitts

Ten thousand North Korean soldiers arrive in Russia to attempt to drive the Ukrainians from Russian soil, although North Korea isn’t at war with Ukraine.

China conducts persistent and aggressive Coast Guard incursions into Taiwan’s territorial waters to attempt to extend and normalize control over the Taiwan Strait, while also trying to intimidate the Philippines to give up its presence in the Second Thomas Shoal.

Russia, China, and Iran use cyber and disinformation operations to attempt to interfere in U.S. elections, a clear violation of U.S. sovereignty and political independence.

Russia is conducting sabotage operations across Europe targeting critical infrastructure to destabilize NATO allies and disrupt their support for Ukraine.

Pyongyang conducted 97 cyberattacks between 2017 and 2024 with total damage of around $3.6 billion.

Welcome to the Gray Zone.

The consequences of the military escalation of great power competition can be severe, and great powers will go to great lengths to avoid direct conflict, given the potential for devastating losses. The reality is that this shadowy gray zone has become a space of increasing activity by U.S. adversaries.

Trump Seizes The Initiative With Ultimatum On Ukraine – Analysis

Luke Coffey

During a presidential debate in Philadelphia last September with Vice President Kamala Harris, Donald Trump made a bold prediction about Ukraine. In response to a question from the moderator, Trump said: “That is a war that’s dying to be settled. I will get it settled before I even become president.” He also frequently claimed that he could end the war within 24 hours of entering the Oval Office.

However, since winning the presidential election in early November, Trump has changed his tone quite a bit on the issue of Ukraine. He even acknowledged that the situation is more complex and harder than he had originally thought, suggesting it could be even more difficult than brokering a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

While speaking to the press in the Oval Office on the evening of Jan. 20, the first day of his second term, Trump was asked if he could still meet his one-day deadline to bring the war to an end. He joked with journalists that he still had “half a day” left to achieve this.

It is clear that much of what Trump said over the past year was purely for the campaign trail. It is likely he never truly believed he could end the war quickly, and the conflict would have to be taken seriously, a point underscored by the people he has appointed to work on this issue. While in other government departments, such as the Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, and the FBI, Trump has selected unconventional and unorthodox leaders, he has chosen more traditional and orthodox appointees for his national security adviser, secretary of state, and special envoy for Ukraine and Russia.

Why Some People Turn To Authoritarianism In The Name Of Freedom – OpEd

Benjamin von Wyl

Just six days after the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, prominent historian Quinn Slobodian and Harvard political scientist William Callison tried to make sense of what had happened in the Boston Review. Just who were the insurgents who had stormed and vandalised the Capitol building? The brightly painted Vikings and cowboys didn’t fit the usual image of far-right vandals. They seemed more like people who wanted to be perceived as individuals.

Slobodian and Callison recognised a political dynamic among many of those involved in the riots which they called “diagonalism”. They coined the term from the term “diagonal thinkers”, as the radical opponents of Covid-19 pandemic measures in German-speaking countries called themselves.

“At the extreme end, diagonal movements share a conviction that all power is conspiracy,” Slobodian and Callison wrote. Many of them believe that public power cannot be legitimate. In many ways, they are “descendants of the extra-parliamentary New Social Movements of the 1970s” who have shifted from left to right – without idealism or the desire for collective action and liberation.

Slobodian and Callison also referred to a study by the University of Basel, led by the sociologist Oliver Nachtwey, on the radical opponents of Covid-19 measures.

Battery-Powered Electric Vehicles Now Match Petrol And Diesel Counterparts For Longevity

Battery-powered electric vehicles are now more reliable and can match the lifespans of traditional cars and vans with petrol and diesel engines – marking a pivotal moment in the drive towards sustainable transportation, a new study reveals.

Researchers used nearly 300 million UK Ministry of Transport (MOT) test records charting the ‘health’ of every vehicle on the United Kingdom’s roads between 2005 and 2022 to estimate vehicle longevity and provide a comprehensive analysis of survival rates for different powertrains.

The international research team found that, although early Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) were less reliable than internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs), rapid advances in technology have enabled newer BEVs to achieve comparable lifespans, even under more intensive use.

Researchers found that BEVs demonstrated the most rapid improvement in reliability, with a 12% lower likelihood of failure (hazard rate) for each successive year of production, compared to 6.7% for petrol and 1.9% for diesel vehicles.

Why The World Is Giving Up On Birthright Citizenship – Analysis

Ryan McMaken

Earlier this week, Donald Trump signed a new executive order which attempts to end so-called “birthright citizenship” in the United States. During the signing ceremony, Trump declared that the United States is “the only country in the world that does this with birthright…”

This is untrue and the Washington Post, among other publications, was quick to declare that Trump “falsely claimed” that the US is the only country with birthright citizenship, also known as the legal principle of unrestricted—or “pure”—jus soli.

Trump would have been accurate, however, had he said that birthright citizenship is becoming rare, and that it is especially rare among those wealthier countries that experience positive net in-migration. In many countries, as generous welfare states attract growing numbers of migrants, the idea of unrestricted jus soli has become less popular.

Indeed, Europe no longer contains any states that offer birthright citizenship, and others have added new restrictions to what jus soli provisions they have.

NATO and Ukraine in the Trump 2.0 Era

The Cipher Brief

While the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has long counted the United States among its most generous and loyal members, many NATO nations were deeply concerned about the prospects of a second Trump administration. During his first term, and then again as a candidate for reelection, Trump had criticized the alliance for not doing enough to shore up its own defenses, and on more than one occasion threatened to pull the U.S. out of NATO entirely. Experts in the U.S. and in Europe are divided on whether the threats were reckless examples of American isolationism, or pragmatic ways of pressuring NATO’s European members to do more, and lean less heavily on Washington.

Either way, in the first week of the Trump administration, these issues have come to the fore. Speaking virtually at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Thursday, Trump called for NATO members to raise defense spending to 5% of GDP, saying this “is what it should have been years ago.” He harkened back to his first administration when he demanded alliance members reach the 2% target: “I insisted that they pay, and they did, because the United States was really paying the difference at that time and it was unfair to the United States.”

Neither Ironman nor the Hulk: Human Enhancements for Military Purposes

Dr. Charlie Black

Fifty years ago Alvin Toffler foretold the future possibility that man will have the capability to redesign the human body. His assertion followed only eight years after the Noble Prize was awarded for describing DNA molecules. “New genetic knowledge will permit us to tinker with human heredity manipulate the genes to create altogether new versions of man.”[1] His future is our reality. In 2020 Dr. Jennifer Doudna was the Nobel laureate in Biochemistry for the “development of a method for gene editing.” For thousands of years human life has adapted to its dynamic environment according to Darwin’s observations. Today we confront the advent of rapidly emerging technologies and converging with new biological knowledge that now gives man the ability to change themselves.[2] This potentiality is perhaps most consequential for U.S. special operations forces who operate on the global periphery and will likely be the first to confront the realities of enhanced soldiers.

Given the trajectory of scientific discovery, the US faces moral and ethical questions surrounding the adoption of these new discoveries to enhance and accelerate human abilities particularly when it is intended for military purposes. One side of the debate are the bio-conservatives such as Fukuyama who embraces essentialism[3] or the many derivatives from Mirandola’s Oration.[4] These along with others collectively argue that man’s natural self is endangered by human enhancements threatening our current and future state of being. Conversely there are transhumanist who view a historical coevolving relationship between man and their invented technologies. They advocate for bio-enhancements that ensure our species survival,[5] or show how humans can remain at the center of change to create better futures.[6] This advocacy for bio-enhancements seeks to confront a pace of change never before experienced by human civilization,[7] or to simply advance the discussion about promising possibilities from enhancements to ensure equal access to all.[8] It is important to note that many non-western cultures hold different moral beliefs do not ask the same ethical questions.

“One Megatrend I’m Following in 2025: Global Supply Chains and Trade Policy”

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views, official position, or endorsement of U.S. government, its departments or agencies, or any other organization associated with the author.

In this analysis by David M. (Infrastructure Resilience Manager at Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency), he chronicles how the global trade and supply chain landscape is undergoing a seismic shift, with profound implications for national security. He unpacks the complexities of trade policy, nearshoring, and the interplay between economic resilience and security.

From Mexico’s surge in foreign direct investment to the People’s Republic of China’s growing influence in North American trade, this piece highlights emerging risks like tariff disputes, supply chain choke points, and vulnerabilities in electronics manufacturing. The article also delves into cybersecurity initiatives like CISA’s “Secure by Design” campaign and the rise of Software Bills of Materials (SBOM) frameworks as tools to mitigate risks.

For national security professionals, understanding these dynamics is critical. This article reveals how trade policy, technology, and geopolitics intersect to influence strategic decision-making in an era of increasing uncertainty.

Geopolitical Cyber Warfare

Rakkhi Joy

Introduction

The Ukraine war has shown that while the cyber battlefield has not eclipsed traditional kinetic warfare, it has an important role to play in espionage and potentially preparation of the battlefield for disruption. This post explores the rise of state-sponsored cyber threats in 2024, profiles key actors like China’s "Typhoon" groups, Russia-North Korea alliances and Iran in the OT world. Finally it outlines actionable strategies for building cyber resilience in this volatile landscape.

Silk Typhoon Beyond Trust vulnerability breach on US Treasury

The Silk Typhoon cyber attacks on the U.S. Treasury, leveraging vulnerabilities in BeyondTrust software, represent a significant breach linked to Chinese state-sponsored actors.

Attack Overview and Attribution

Who

The attacks were attributed to Silk Typhoon (also known as Hafnium or UNC5221), a Chinese state-backed Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) group known for cyber espionage targeting sectors such as defense, healthcare, education, and government entities.

When

The breach began in early December 2024, with BeyondTrust detecting anomalous activity on December 2nd and confirming the compromise by December 5th. The Treasury was notified on December 8th.

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)