It was a sober but insistent warning by the head of the French Cyber Defense Command (Comcyber), General Aymeric Bonnemaison. The technical support operations carried out by American military teams on the networks of an increasing number of European countries, particularly since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, in order to track down possible Russian intrusions, "raise questions," said this senior French officer on Thursday, January 10, at the weekly press briefing of the ministry of the armed forces.
That was a polite euphemism on the part of the very discreet head of Comcyber, who had already described these American operations as "relatively aggressive" during a closed-door hearing before the defense committee of the Assemblée Nationale in December 2022, made public on January 4. His comments highlight French concerns about Washington's maneuvers, particularly with respect to countries on Europe's eastern flank.
By opening up the heart of their networks to American cyber combatants, countries are exposing themselves to a form of "entryism," general Bonnemaison stated in front of parliamentarians. Specialists believe that in cyber matters, the simple fact that a country allows a foreign power, even an ally, access to its most sensitive capabilities, is an open door to intelligence-gathering operations, and therefore espionage.
Intrusive instruments
The risk is all the greater given that the United States' surveillance tools are considered to be among the most powerful but also the most intrusive in the Western bloc. The United States has come to "fill a void," "I cannot be opposed to that," said General Bonnemaison on Thursday. But the American approach "goes quite far," he also said during his hearing before MPs in December, adding: Their approach "protects, but with a marked presence in the service of diplomacy."
"Behind America's technical support in cyber matters, there is clearly a stake of reinforcing alliances with a certain number of countries," said Julien Nocetti, a professor at the Saint-Cyr military academy and researcher at the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI). In the long term, this necessarily raises the question of friction with allied networks.
More than 30 of these operations, dubbed "Hunt Forward Operations" (HFO) by the US Cyber Command, have been conducted since 2018 in some 18 countries, according to documents made public by the Pentagon in late 2022. That was the case before the war in Estonia, Montenegro and North Macedonia, in May in Lithuania and in August in Croatia. These HFOs are clearly defined by the Pentagon as a "forward defense" and "constant engagement" strategy to protect US networks "by operating as close as possible to the origin of the adversary's activity."
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