The report comes a year after President Trump handed over the digital offence and defence domain to a narrowly specialised Pentagon arm called the US Cyber Command.
The US is escalating digital incursions into Russia's electric power grid in an attempt to warn Russian President Vladimir Putin and show off how aggressively the Trump administration is deploying cyber-tools, The New York Times wrote, citing current and former government officials.
The sources reportedly described a little covered deployment of American computer code inside Russia's grid and other targets as a classified companion to more publicly discussed actions directed at Moscow around the 2018 midterm elections last October.
The edition says that the administration declined to describe the specific actions it was taking under the new powers that were granted last year by the White House and Congress to the special US Cyber Command, the arm of the Pentagon that specialises on the military's offensive and defensive online operations.
According to the cited officials, the US has conducted reconnaissance probes into the control systems of the Russian grid since at least 2012. They remarked, though, that American policies have now shifted more to offence, placing “potentially crippling malware inside the Russian system at a depth and with an aggressiveness that had never been tried before”, the newspaper wrote. However, it went on to say that the head of the US Cyber Command, General Paul Nakasone,…
