Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

by Andy Greenberg

“The use of asymmetric and indirect operations.” As the prime example of this new form of war, Gerasimov had pointed to the Arab Spring revolutions across North Africa, arguing they showed how external political factors could weaken or destroy a regime. That part of his analysis reflected the dubious conspiracy theory—no doubt commonly held within the Kremlin—that the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya had all somehow been secretly fomented by Western governments. But as Galeotti wrote in his commentary on the Gerasimov article, the Arab Spring comparisons seemed to be only a pretense to talk about how Russia itself could weaken or destroy its own enemies. And the way to do that, Gerasimov argued, was with nontraditional, asymmetric, covert attacks on the pillars of their social stability, often by means of what he called informatsionnoye protivoborstvo, or “informational confrontation.”