Are We Already in a Cyberwar? What the Government Isn’t Saying Out Loud

When most people hear the word war, they picture bombs, tanks, and soldiers on the ground. But in 2025, war has many fronts — and one of the most active, contested, and hidden is in cyberspace. The United States and its adversaries are locked in a persistent struggle that looks a lot like war, even if officials carefully avoid the word.

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 5 Takeaways in 30 Seconds

• America is already in a continuous cyber conflict with China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
• Salt Typhoon, Volt Typhoon, and Iranian groups are embedded in U.S. critical infrastructure.
• Disinformation is as much a weapon as malware — and domestic politics amplify it.
• Trump’s attacks on DOJ, FBI, and the military have weakened America’s defenses from within.

The best defenses are often invisible: hardening infrastructure, disrupting adversaries upstream, and preparing for the day of crisis.

Why Washington Won’t Call It a War

• Diplomatic stakes: Declaring cyberwar could trigger treaties or escalate conflicts.
• Secrecy: Revealing full details risks exposing intelligence methods.
• Panic control: Downplaying keeps markets steady and prevents public fear.

So officials talk about threats and espionage. But the effects — compromised systems, disrupted services, disinformation — look exactly like warfare.

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A Timeline of Escalation

• 2024–2025: Salt Typhoon — Chinese hackers infiltrated telecom networks and even the U.S. Army National Guard.
• March 2025: ODNI Threat Assessment — China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea flagged as the top cyber threats to U.S. critical infrastructure.
• May 2025: Supply-Chain Espionage — Long-term campaigns stealing intellectual property and embedding malware in suppliers.
• July 2025: Iran’s Cyber Ops — Targeted utilities, transport, and defense contractors.
• August 2025: NSA Advisory — Exposed Chinese APTs targeting telecom, government, and hospitality sectors.

This isn’t an occasional hack. It’s a drumbeat of nation-state campaigns against America’s backbone.

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Disinformation as a Weapon

The fight isn’t just in servers. It’s in our feeds. Russia, China, Iran, and others amplify divisive content. At the same time, domestic actors weaponize lies to split Americans apart.

The result: chaos, mistrust, and polarization — the perfect conditions for adversaries to exploit.

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The Internal Threat: Undermining Our Own Defenses

It isn’t only foreign adversaries who make America vulnerable.

• Donald Trump’s treatment of our institutions — from the Department of Justice to the FBI, the military, and intelligence services — has actively weakened the nation’s ability to respond to cyberwar and disinformation.
• Eroding trust in institutions: By attacking the FBI, DOJ, and military leadership, Trump encouraged Americans to doubt the very people tasked with defending them.
• Disabling counterterror and counterinsurgency work: His rhetoric and decisions have hollowed out the departments built after 9/11 to track extremist threats.
• Encouraging disinformation: By labeling facts as “fake news” while promoting conspiracy outlets, he blurred the line between reality and propaganda — exactly the condition adversaries like Russia and China exploit.
• Weaponizing government against critics: His efforts to punish opponents and shield loyalists stripped away the neutrality law enforcement and intelligence depend on.

Foreign adversaries don’t have to invent ways to divide us when one of our own leaders does it for them. America cannot defend itself against external cyberwar if it tolerates internal sabotage of its defenses.

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What America Should Do (Even If We Never Hear About It)

The U.S. can’t afford to wait for a crisis. Even if the public doesn’t always see it, there are concrete steps that should be happening quietly behind the scenes:

• Harden what matters most: Require strict baseline protections for energy grids, telecom, hospitals, and water systems. No more insecure defaults.
• Shift software responsibility: Push vendors to design secure systems from the start, and fund safer coding practices like Rust and Go for critical components.
• See faster, share faster: Make incident reporting usable and rapid, with feedback loops from CISA back to victims. Expand joint hunt teams inside critical networks.
• Disrupt adversaries upstream: Take down command-and-control servers, burn botnets, and sanction front companies — without always making headlines.
• Fortify the information space: Counter disinformation with prebunking, rapid advisories, and media literacy. Treat information like infrastructure.
• Prepare for the bad day: Run drills simulating simultaneous attacks on power, water, and 911 systems, and maintain tested backups in the cloud.
• Build the bench: Grow the cyber workforce through scholarships and fast-track clearances, moving talent between government and industry.

The best cyber victories are the ones the public never sees — because the disaster never happens.

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Why It Matters

We are in a continuous, low-level cyber conflict. The signs are clear:

• State actors embedded inside our infrastructure.
• Persistent espionage campaigns.
• Readiness to disrupt utilities and transport in a crisis.
• Disinformation aimed directly at our cohesion.
• Internal political sabotage of the very defenses meant to protect us.

Call it what you want — conflict, competition, or hybrid warfare. But the truth is simple: we are already living in a cyberwar.

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What You Can Do

• Watch CISA and NSA alerts.
• Use multi-factor authentication, strong passwords, and updates.
• Verify before sharing content online — disinformation thrives on speed.

The battle is here, whether we name it or not. The sooner we acknowledge it, the stronger we’ll be.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

Cyber Security...CyberWar Is At Our Door

We now know (actually already a year ago in 2017) that a 757 sitting on the tarmac can be weaponized through cyber attack. Trains can be weaponized. We have a problem that needs an answer... yesterday.

Boeing 757

This makes me sad. I was part of a cybersecurity group in the late 90s early 2000s dedicated to bringing business, police and government together on issues of cyber security. We did good work, we made advances.

We decreased the distrust between government and computer experts, "white hat" (good) hackers and law enforcement. Those efforts continue to this day. But I have retired and am onto other ventures and adventures. I did my time. I no longer have to live that frustration and yet today? I find I still am. Only now from a distance.

We tried to warn people on both sides going back twenty years and yet, we are still now in this situation when we had so long ago had warned so many! Our issue back then was in part that corporations paid too little or no attention to actual cyber security issues. Those were the days when it wasn't as big as some of us knew it would eventually be. Just as it is today.

Why didn't CEO's and government listen? Government has special issues that slow things down and for good reason for the most part. But business can and sometimes does move as they wish ,if they wish it, and yet... they mostly have not.

We argued in part back then that corporations weren't even spending 1% of their budget or even of their IT budgets, on cybersecurity issues. When it should have been closer to 10%. That may have been extreme, but in light of today, of reality, was it really? Invest and innovate, or pay later.

IF they had done that, back then? We would not be in the position today that we find ourselves in. And that, is a fact.

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg's motto of "Move fast and break things" and his explanation of that in 2013: "We want to build our culture and our infrastructures, that we just try to move, you know, one or two clicks faster than, than other companies. And, you know, sometimes we go to fast and we mess up a bunch of stuff and then we have to fix it. And that's cool."

Really Mr. Zuckerberg? Because that actually seems to exemplify a vast misunderstanding of how the internet works. That may be how it worked back in the 90s. Maybe. When security was low and "black hat" type bad actor hackers and criminals were still gearing up, learning how to abuse a good thing. But today you really have to KNOW exactly what you're doing online. Especially when you are responsible for literally billions of people on your platform.

An article came out this week from Axios Codebook about this related to our Congress:

"Only 6 House candidates spent $1,000 on cybersecurity"

"The defining moment in the 2016 election was Russia's breach of the Democratic National Committee. Two years later, McClatchy reports that candidates for Congress are knowingly underspending on cybersecurity — with only 6 spending more than $1,000."

As we've seen, there is also the potential for very bad things to happen IF you... 1) don't know what can happen because you haven't fully planned out the potential for good AND bad things to happen, and 2) you have to fully understand that business as usual as you have planned it out, in order to make money off that platform, off those people, can indeed damage not only those individuals using your platform, but also entire countires.

Because, there are bad actors out there, predators, whose lives are devoted to finding ways, people and platforms to abuse, with no moral or ethical concerns. When you have a platform that large, you also have an oversized responsibility to be not only fully aware of how your platform and your business model can positively AND negatively affect people, but you also have to be better possibly, than you even are capable of.

And that is a serious concern.

Rather than increase their cyber security efforts and budgets smoothly, easily, over the years to more than they thought they needed it (and their cyber people knew they needed but were ignored or given miniscule, fly by night amounts to work with), they could by now have organically prepared over those past years (if not decades) to have spent less money overall. Consider what it cost Sony in their North Korean hack for the film, The Interview.

Rather than the cost now a days as well as having their reputation dragged through the mud and in losing even more money because of their lack of attention and resources and due to such bad actors as China, North Korea and Russia, just to name a few of today's major players.

Why? Capitalism run rampant? Defective corporate thinking? Yes, to be sure. But also a business as usual desire, based in greed and funneling too much money to shareholders and other such types. Rather than putting money into hyper serious concerns that merely weren't a concern to those in power at the time. Not until it was too late.

Maintaining bottom lines where the risk was considered worth it and they could not see that not only was it not worth it, but that risk was far greater than they could be made to understand, or even imagine.

Because the threat wasn't just for that year, or the year after, but in future years. It was the difference between simply installing a piece of software protection, or a method, and having a mindset that evolved over the years to come, to orient the corporation or government department in a certain way.

To see the future, then. To have build a paradigm, a mindset that would endure and evolve over time to protect and defend and protect profits and the American citizen, way of life, and national health. Both economically and emotionally.

Too often companies were saved only through the dedicated and excessive workloads of their computer IT departments. Not because they were there but because they had to make themselves overworked.

Rather than those typically overburdened, over educated, overdedicated IT workers receiving the necessary funding (which seldom happened) as well as confidence from management. The corporate attitude from on high so typically was (and still is):

"We pay them, so do your job!" Rather than "We delved into it, then give them what they needed to DO their job. We compensated them "appropriately." And we have confidence in them as they have gratitude in us for going that extra mile, for them, for us, and for our stock holders, customers, or citizens."

But that isn't the case.

It would be disingenuous for typically lucky management to point and say, "But we didn't have a devastating hack!" While they may not have known what they barely avoided, perhaps too many times. All because of the dedicated overworked efforts of their security IT people and perhaps...just good luck,

Those far too many times, they did have a successful hack against them. All too often, even. It has in fact been the point of many companies, credit card companies that the way they protected their card holders was simply to forgive their having been hacked, and absorb the cost.

Having set aside annually so much loss for fraud and hacks and yet, they still made billions of dollars overall. Simply in part, because they did not put the money and resources into handling things correctly because it seemed to frequently to those who did not understand, at the top, that it was simply money thrown away to protect themselves properly. To research and develop proactively. To overburden their IT shops rather than hire enough people and expend the money necessary to truly protect themselves.

Ignorance. It is the mainstay of business and the political party of business in this country. In all countries.

LUCK is NOT how you win wars. Be it cyber or otherwise. Nor is ignorance. Something we see as a governing body today in our current conservative Republican Trump administration.

We are now beyond that point while Russians and others have already tested our systems and have a good idea what to do if and when they choose to do it. To truly attack, on a massive scale. But again we are still protected by MAD (nuclear weapon Mutually Assured Destruction). Because a massive attack would surely need to lead to a nuclear war. It would have to. And they (Russians, North Korea, etc.) now that.

And so they attack under the wire, under the trigger point, in hitting our social media, oru elections and other things. Some of which we seldom hear about in public due to "national security issues."

And so our primary perceived protection? MAD, still. Physical war when a cyberwar is perpetrated upon us. Does that make you feel all warm and fuzzy and secure? Because, it shouldn't. Look what Russia did and what our response was and has been to cyber attacks on our 2016 and soon (and still) 2018 elections. Pathetic.

To be sure, we are more protected now than we were during the 2016 election or the previous one before it. But that does not say we are safe enough yet, and we do have a lot of work left, costly work even, to get there.

It's time already, time passed twenty years ago when we were first warned.

Stop looking only at profit. It's destroying this country in a counter intuitive paradigm anathema to  the purposely ignorant conservative, corporate, capitalist mind.

Tough beans, people. This, is reality.