Russia, China, And Cyber Espionage
Cyber operations are also an essentially asymmetric tool, in that they level the playing field between nations that may have wide disparities in terms of the effectiveness of their conventional forces. However, this cuts both ways, as the United States also conducts a considerable number of cyber operations in support of intelligence collection. This leads into the third primary advantage of cyber as it relates to espionage, which is that cyber-capabilities make exfiltrating large volumes of information much, much easier than would be the case otherwise.