Eurasia Press & News
The United States has significantly scaled up its cyber warfare against Russia, China, and Iran under the pretext of deflecting alleged interference from the trio in its 2020 presidential elections, according to The New York Times.
The American paper ran the story on Monday, the eve of the polls. The election is contested by Democratic and Republican archrivals Joe Biden and Donald Trump, who is seeking a second term in office.
The Cyber Command, a subdivision of the US military, originally launched the operation in 2018 before expanding it in dimension to “find foreign hacking groups before the election,” the daily alleged.
“Since 2018, we have expanded our hunt forward operations to all major adversaries,” said Lt. Gen. Charles L. Moore Jr., deputy head of Cyber Command.
The project features the Pentagon branch’s assigning “experts” to locations across Europe and the Middle East, and purportedly taking down the networks that it accuses of electoral meddling.
The Times claimed that the Cyber Command “was largely on the sidelines in 2016,” when Trump won his first term against former secretary of state Hillary Clinton amid far-and-wide allegations of Russian meddling in his favor.
‘Aggressive US posture’
“For the 2018 midterm elections, the command took a far more aggressive posture,” the paper said, but reported that despite the enhanced confrontational approach, Russia was still the main focus of the US’s cyberwar.
“We want to take down the archer rather than dodge the arrows,” Moor claimed.
None of the countries that have been targeted in the American campaign have, however, acknowledged any of Washington’s incessant accusations of electoral interference.
Iran that also started coming under a campaign of economic terrorism on the part of Trump’s administration, which returned its sanctions against the Islamic Republic, has not only roundly rejected the allegations, but also has clearly announced that it was not concerned with the identity of the US’s next president, but the upcoming administration’s official policies.
The Islamic Republic has also vowed to keep resisting the US’s pressure if the future American head of state chose to retain his country’s adversarial policies towards Tehran.
