Is Cuba a Cyber-Attack Conduit?

Brahma Chellaney, a former Member of India's National Security Council, wrote an interesting article for the Project Syndicate entitled, "China's Cyber-Warriors."

Chellaney notes that:

"The state-sponsored transnational cyber threat is at two levels. The first is national, with the hackers largely interested in two objectives. One is to steal secrets and gain an asymmetrical advantage over another country. Cyber intrusion in peacetime allows the prowler to read the content and understand the relative importance of different computer networks so that it knows what to disable in a conflict situation. The other objective is commercial: to pilfer intellectual property.

The second level of cyber threat is against chosen individuals. The most common type of intrusion is an attempt to hack into e-mail accounts. The targets also can face Trojan-horse attacks by e-mail intended to breach their computers and allow the infiltrators to corrupt or transfer files remotely.

To be sure, if a cyber attack is camouflaged, it is not easy to identify the country from which it originated. Through the use of so-called 'false-flag espionage' and other methods, attacks can be routed through the computers of a third country. Just as some Chinese pharmaceutical firms exported to Africa spurious medicines with 'Made in India' labels – a fact admitted by the Chinese government – some Chinese hackers are known to have routed their cyber intrusion through computers in Russia, Iran, Cuba, and other countries."

Cuba is a totalitarian country with strict control over all cyber activity. Therefore, it's highly improbable that such attacks could take place from the island without the acquiescence of the Castro regime.

Plus it wouldn't be the first time that Cuba serves as a conduit to stifle dissent in other tyrannies.

In 2003, it was reported that the Castro regime began jamming U.S. government and private Persian-language TV and radio broadcasts into Iran at the behest of that country's brutal mullahs.

A disturbing pattern of cyber collusion.