Taiwan’s head of cybersecurity told CNN Business this month that it is using dramatic measures to guard against technological vulnerabilities — including employing roughly two dozen computer experts to deliberately attack the government’s systems and help it defend against what Taiwanese authorities estimate are some 20 million to 40 million cyberattacks every month.
Taiwan says it has been able to defend against the overwhelming majority of attacks. Successful breaches number in the hundreds, while only a handful are what the government classifies as “serious.”
But the enormous number — and where Taiwan thinks they’re coming from — has compelled the government to take the issue seriously, according to Chien Hung-wei, head of Taiwan’s Department of Cyber Security.
“Based on the attackers’ actions and methodology, we have a rather high degree of confidence that many attacks originated from our neighbor,” he told CNN Business, referring to mainland China.
“The operation of our government highly relies on the internet,” Chien said. “Our critical infrastructure, such as gas, water and electricity are highly digitized, so we can easily fall victim if our network security is not robust enough.”
Cyberattacks are a growing global threat. And while China is far from the only country to be accused of orchestrating such attacks, Beijing this week is facing intense scrutiny from the West on the issue.
On Monday, the United States, the European Union and other allies accused China’s Ministry of State Security of using “criminal contract hackers” to carry out malicious activities around the world, including a campaign against Microsoft’s Exchange email service in March.
The coordinated announcement has illustrated the Biden administration’s priorities in defending cybersecurity, after serious vulnerabilities had been reported in major American sectors, such as energy and food production.
Chien said Taiwan suspects that state-backed hackers were behind at least one major malware attack on the island last year. In May 2020, CPC Corporation — a government-owned refiner in Taiwan — was hacked and left unable to process electronic payments from customers. The Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau accused a hacker group linked to China of carrying out the attack.
China has repeatedly denied launching cyberattacks against Taiwan and others. In a statement to CNN Business, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the island’s accusations “groundless and purely malicious.” China’s Taiwan Affairs Office also criticized Taiwanese authorities for using cyberattacks to smear the mainland as a “habitual trick,” and to shift the public’s focus away from the island’s recent Covid-19 outbreak.
And after China was accused by the West earlier this week of launching a massive, global hacking campaign, the country blasted the claims as “groundless.”
“We strongly urge the United States and its allies to stop pouring dirty water on China on cybersecurity issues,” Zhao Lijian, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman, said on Tuesday. “China firmly opposes and cracks down on cyberattacks of any kind, let alone encourages, supports or indulges them.”
Tensions with China
Taiwan and mainland China have been governed separately since the end of the Chinese Civil War more than 70 years ago. While the Chinese Communist Party has never ruled Taiwan, Beijing considers the island to be an “inseparable part” of its territory and has repeatedly threatened to use force if necessary to prevent the island from formally declaring independence.
In recent years, China has stepped up its military pressure on Taiwan. In June, the country sent over two dozen warplanes near the island, prompting Taiwan to alert its air defenses. That was the largest number of warplanes sent to that zone since Taiwan began keeping records of such incursions last year. Beijing has also released military propaganda warning Taipei to “prepare for war” as it establishes stronger ties with the United States. (Analysts say the flights likely serve several purposes for China, including as a demonstration of the strength of the country’s military and as a way to gain intelligence it needs for any potential conflict involving Taiwan.)
Experts have voiced concerns not just about the prospect of military warfare, but cyber warfare, too.
Earlier this month, US-based cybersecurity company Recorded Future alleged that a Chinese state-sponsored group has been targeting the Industrial Technology Research Institute, a Taiwanese hi-tech research institution.
Recorded Future said it found that Chinese groups have been targeting organizations across Taiwan’s semiconductor industry to obtain source codes, software development kits and chip designs. It based its claims on evidence it compiled using a method called network traffic analysis, which examines such traffic to detect security threats.
China’s Taiwan Affairs Office did not respond to questions about that analysis, but accused Taiwanese authorities of inciting anti-China hatred and increasing cross-strait conflicts.
Preparing for risks
A number of countries are now focusing on the mounting threat of cyberattacks, which in recent months crippled one of the largest fuel pipelines in the United States and shut down major operations for meat supplier JBS USA.
In April, the US Department of Justice declared 2020 the “worst year ever” for extortion-related cyberattacks. And the first half of 2021 saw a 102% increase in ransomware attacks compared to the same time period last year, according to cybersecurity firm Check Point Software.
Allen Own, CEO of Taiwanese cybersecurity company Devcore, said hackers can often be categorized into two groups: those who are working for profit, and those who are stealing information of national importance.
He said many countries — including the United States, China, Russia and North Korea — have assembled formidable “cyber armies” to either obtain intelligence or infiltrate another country’s infrastructure, or defend against attackers that might do the same to them. That kind of power highlights the need for Taiwan to boost its own capabilities.
“In information security, many people say that World War III will happen over the internet,” he said.
Taiwan says, meanwhile, that it has been attuned to these types of risks for years.
In 2016, the Executive Yuan — Taiwan’s highest administrative organ — set up the Department of Cyber Security to mitigate security risks.
President Tsai Ing-wen at the time declared cybersecurity a matter of national security. This May, she announced the creation of a new digital development ministry, which will supervise the information and communication sector with a focus of protecting critical infrastructure, according to Taiwan’s official Central News Agency.
In an exclusive interview with CNN last month, Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Joseph Wu accused China of using military intimidation, disinformation campaigns and cyberattacks to undermine the Taiwanese population’s trust in their own government.
“They want to shape Taiwanese people’s cognition that Taiwan is very dangerous, and Taiwan cannot do without China,” he said. “[But] Taiwan has some very good capability in dealing with cyberattacks. And that is because of our long experience dealing with the cyber activities initiated by the Chinese side.”
Chien, the Taiwanese cybersecurity department leader, said the self-governing island has been subject to tens of millions of attacks monthly, a trend the government has recorded for at least the last few years.
But he said Taiwan has been able to defend against most attempts and serious breaches resulting in stolen data or paralyzed services numbered about 10 over the last year.
Chien declined to go into specific details about those attacks, and was willing only to cite successful hacks of Taiwan’s education system, which resulted in student data being stolen.
Even if a cyber intrusion is resolved, such attacks can have long-term consequences because of the kind of information that attackers can gain access to, according to Tsai Sung-ting, CEO of Team T5, a Taiwanese cybersecurity solution provider.
“We frequently observe that after they compromise an organization, the first thing is to steal the emails and documents,” he said. “So even after you clean the infection this time, they may come back next month or a few months later. So I will say the threat is persistent.”
— CNN’s Beijing bureau contributed to this report.
BOSTON (AP) — In the past few weeks, ransomware criminals claimed as trophies at least three North American insurance brokerages that offer policies to help others survive the very network-paralyzing, data-pilfering extortion attacks they themselves apparently suffered.
Cybercriminals who hack into corporate and government networks to steal sensitive data for extortion routinely try to learn how much cyber insurance coverage the victims have. Knowing what victims can afford to pay can give them an edge in ransom negotiations. The cyber insurance industry, too, is a prime target for crooks seeking its customers’ identities and scope of coverage.
Before ransomware evolved into a full-scale global epidemic plaguing businesses, hospitals, schools and local governments, cyber insurance was a profitable niche industry. It was accused of fueling the criminal feeding frenzy by routinely recommending that victims pay up, but kept many from going bankrupt.
Now, the sector isn’t just in the criminals’ crosshairs. It’s teetering on the edge of profitability, upended by a more than 400% rise last year in ransomware cases and skyrocketing extortion demands. As a percentage of premiums collected, cyber insurance payouts now top 70%, the break-even point.
Read more on the Kaseya ransomware attack
Fabian Wosar, chief technical officer of Emsisoft, a cybersecurity firm specializing in ransomware, said the prevailing attitude among insurers is no longer: Pay the criminals. It’s likely to be cheaper for all involved.
“The ransomware groups got way too greedy too quickly. So the cost-benefit equation the insurers initially used to figure out whether or not they should pay a ransom — it’s just not there anymore,” he said.
It’s not clear how the single biggest ransomware attack on record, which began Friday, will impact insurers. But it can’t be good.
Pressure is building on the industry to stop reimbursing for ransoms.
In May, the major cyber insurer AXA decided to do so with all new policies in France. But it is so far apparently alone in the industry, and governments are not moving to outlaw reimbursement.
AXA is among major insurers that have suffered ransomware attacks, with operations in Thailand hard-hit. Chicago-based CNA Financial Corp., the seventh–ranked U.S. cybersecurity underwriter last year, saw its network crippled in March. Less than a week earlier, the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future published an interview with a member of the Russian-speaking ransomware gang, REvil, that is skilled in pre-attack intelligence-gathering and happens to be behind the current attack. He suggested it actively targets insurers for data on their clients.
CNA would not confirm a Bloomberg report that it paid a $40 million ransom, which would be the highest reported ransom on record. Nor would it say what or how much data was stolen. It said only that systems where most policyholder data was stored “were not impacted.”
In a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, CNA also said that its losses might not be fully covered by its insurance and “future cybersecurity insurance coverage may be difficult to obtain or may only be available at significantly higher costs to us.”
Another major insurance player hit by ransomware was broker Gallagher. Although it was hit in September, only this past week (June 30) did it disclose that the attackers may have stolen highly detailed data from an unspecified number of customers — from passwords and Social Security numbers to credit card data and medical diagnoses. Company spokeswoman Kelli Murray would not say if any cyber insurance policy contracts were on compromised servers. Nor would she say whether Gallagher paid a ransom. The criminals, from the RagnarLocker gang, apparently never posted information about the attack on their dark web leak site, suggesting that Gallagher paid.
Of the three insurance brokers that ransomware gangs claimed to have attacked in recent weeks, posting stolen data on their dark web sites as evidence, two, in Montreal and Detroit, did not respond to phone calls and emails. The third, in southern California, acknowledged being hobbled for a week.
By the time the Colonial Pipeline and major meat processer JBS were hit by ransomware in May, insurers were already passing higher coverage costs to customers.
Cyber premiums jumped by 29% in January in the U.S. and Canada from the previous month, said Gregory Eskins, an analyst at top commercial insurance broker Marsh McLennan. In February, the month-to-month jump was 32%, in March it was 39%.
In a bid to turn back ransomware-related losses — Eskins said they amounted to about 40% of cyber insurance claims in North America last year — policy renewals are carrying new, stricter rules or lowered coverage limits.
“The price has to match the risk,” said Michael Phillips, chief claims officer at the San Francisco cyber insurance firm Resilience and a co-chair of the public-private Ransomware Task Force.
A policy might now specify that reimbursement for extortion payments can’t exceed one-third of overall coverage, which typically also encompasses recovery and lost income and can include payments to PR firms to mitigate reputational damage. Or an insurer may cut coverage in half, or introduce a deductible, said Brent Reith of the broker Aon.
While some smaller carriers have dropped coverage altogether, the big players are instead retooling.
Then there are hybrid insurers like Resilience and Boston-based Corvus. They don’t simply ask potential customers to fill out a questionnaire. They physically probe their cyber defenses and actively engage clients as cyber threats occur.
“We’re monitoring and making active recommendations not just once a year but throughout the year and dynamically,” said Corvus CEO Phil Edmundson.
But is the overall industry nimble enough to absorb the growing onslaught?
The Government Accountability Office warned in a May report that “the extent to which cyber insurance will continue to be generally available and affordable remains uncertain.” And the New York State Department of Finance said in a February circular that massive industry losses were possible.
Both insured and insurers, stingy about sharing experiences and data, shoulder the blame for that, the U.K. Royal United Services Institute said in a new report. Most ransomware attacks go unreported, and no central clearinghouse on them exists, though governments are beginning to pressure for mandatory industry reporting. As a business sector, insurers are not especially transparent. In the U.S. they are regulated not by the federal government but by the states.
And for now, cyber insurers are mostly resisting calls to halt reimbursements for ransoms paid.
In a May earnings call, the CEO of U.K.-based Beazley, Adrian Cox, said “generally speaking network security is not good enough at the moment.” He said it is up to government to decide whether payments are bad public policy. CEO Evan Greenberg of the leading U.S. cyber insurer, Chubb Limited, agreed in the company’s annual report in February that deciding on a ban is government’s purview. But he did endorse outlawing payments.
Jan Lemnitzer, a Copenhagen Business School lecturer, thinks cyber insurance should be compulsory for businesses large and small, just as everyone who drives must have car insurance and seat belts. The Royal United Services Institute study recommends it for all government suppliers and vendors.
While he considers banning ransom payments problematic, Lemnitzer says it would be a “no-brainer” to compel insurers to stop reimbursing for them.
Some have suggested imposing fines on ransom payments as a disincentive. Or the government could retain a percentage of any cryptocurrency recovered from ransomware criminals, the proceeds going to a federal ransomware defense fund.
Such measures could bite into criminal revenues, said attorney Stewart Baker of Steptoe and Johnson, a former NSA general counsel.
“In the long run, it probably means that resources that are currently going to Russia to pay for Ferraris in Moscow will instead go to improve cybersecurity in the United States.”
There are records for more than 32 million accounts in the United States, 11 million in the United Kingdom, and 6 million in India, according to Alon Gal, the CTO of cyber intelligence firm Hudson Rock.
Details in some cases include full name, location, birthday, email addresses, phone number, and relationship status, he said.
Hudson Rock showed CNN Business the phone numbers of two our senior staff which are included in the database.
The leak was first reported by the news website Insider.
“This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019. We found and fixed this issue in August 2019,” Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone told CNN Saturday.
Facebook did not say if it notified affected users at the time.
Stone added, “In 2019, we removed people’s ability to directly find others using their phone number across both Facebook and Instagram – a function that could be exploited using sophisticated software code, to imitate Facebook and provide a phone number to find which users it belonged to.”
Although this data is from 2019 it could still be of value to hackers and cyber criminals like those who engage in identify theft.
Hudson Rock’s Alon Gal pointed out on Twitter that the way the data was sorted and posted on the hacking site this week makes it far more accessible for criminals to exploit.
Rachel Tobac, an ethical hacker and CEO of SocialProof Security, told CNN, “These are the pieces of data cyber criminals spend time searching for to perform social engineering attacks (a type of hacking) — but now they’re all in one place and easily accessible in this leak, which makes social engineering quicker and easier.”
MANAMA, Bahrain – After weeks at sea, hundreds of young Americans shed their military uniforms for baseball caps and T-shirts and poured forth from the main gates of the heavily fortified U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet base, a major hub for U.S. naval forces in the Middle East.
The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln had just docked in Bahrain, a small Arab island nation on the southwestern coast of the Persian Gulf. The disembarking U.S. service members were intent on cutting loose for a respite from their national security mission patrolling one of the world’s busiest and most volatile shipping lanes.
About 200 miles to the east, across a body of water that has seen many tense naval encounters and acts of sabotage, sat America’s longtime adversary Iran.
It was November 2019.
A few months later, the U.S. and Iran would nearly enter into an open confrontation after Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps fired ballistic missiles at two Iraqi military bases housing U.S. soldiers. The attack was retaliation for the Pentagon’s assassination of senior Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani.
For the sailors, Bahrain’s “American Alley” was a taste of home: a thoroughfare of fast-food restaurants and shops catering to Westerners. The sailors clutched iPhones and Starbucks coffee and fended off attempts by locals to sell them watches and other trinkets.
For America’s military planners back in Washington, the sailors represented a longstanding bedrock of U.S. national security: one of the Pentagon’s hundreds of footholds all over the planet.
For decades, the U.S. has enjoyed global military dominance, an achievement that has underpinned its influence, national security and efforts at promoting democracy.
The Department of Defense spends more than $700 billion a year on weaponry and combat preparedness – more than the next 10 countries combined, according to economic think tank the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.
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The U.S. military’s reach is vast and empire-like.
In Germany, about 45,000 Americans go to work each day around the Kaiserslautern Military Community, a network of U.S. Army and Air Force bases that accommodates schools, housing complexes, dental clinics, hospitals, community centers, sports clubs, food courts, military police and retail stores. About 60,000 American military and civilian personnel are stationed in Japan; another 30,000 in South Korea. More than 6,000 U.S. military personnel are spread across Africa, according to the Department of Defense.
Yet today, amid a sea change in security threats, America’s military might overseas may be less relevant than it once was, say some security analysts, defense officials and former and active U.S. military service members.
The most urgent threats to the U.S., they say, are increasingly nonmilitary in nature. Among them: cyberattacks; disinformation; China’s economic dominance; climate change; and disease outbreaks such as COVID-19, which ravaged the U.S. economy like no event since the Great Depression.
Trita Parsi, co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington-based think tank that lobbies for U.S. military restraint overseas, said maintaining a large fighting force thousands of miles from U.S. shores is expensive, unwieldy and anachronistic.
“It was designed for a world that still faced another military hegemon,” Parsi said. “Now, pandemics, climate chaos, artificial intelligence and 5G are far more important for American national security than having 15 bases in the Indian Ocean.”
It may also be counterproductive. Parsi said terrorism recruitment in the Middle East has correlated with U.S. base presence, for example.
Meanwhile, American white supremacists, not foreign terrorists, present the gravest terrorism threat to the U.S., according to a report from the Department of Homeland Security issued in October – three months before a violent mob stormed the Capitol.
Delivering his first major foreign policy speech as commander-in-chief, President Joe Biden said earlier this month that he instructed Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to lead a “Global Posture Review of our forces so that our military footprint is appropriately aligned with our foreign policy and national security priorities.”
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At the end of World War II, the U.S. had fewer than 80 overseas military bases, the majority of them in the allies’ vanquished foes Germany and Japan.
Today there are up to 800, according to data from the Pentagon and an outside expert, David Vine, an anthropology professor at American University in Washington. About 220,000 U.S. military and civilian personnel serve in more than 150 countries, the Defense Department says.
China, by contrast, the world’s second-largest economy and by all accounts the United States’ biggest competitor, has just a single official overseas military base, in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa. (Camp Lemonnier, the largest U.S. base in Africa, is just miles away.) Britain, France and Russia have up to 60 overseas bases combined, according to Vine. At sea, the U.S. has 11 aircraft carriers. China has two. Russia has one.
The exact number of American bases is difficult to determine due to secrecy, bureaucracy and mixed definitions. The 800 bases figure is inflated, some argue, by the Pentagon’s treatment of multiple base sites near one another as separate installations. USA TODAY has determined the dates for when more than 350 of these bases opened. It’s not clear how many of the rest are actively used.
“They’re counting every little patch, every antenna on the top of a mountain with an 8-foot fence around it,” said Philip M. Breedlove, a retired four-star general in the U.S. Air Force who also served as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander for Europe. Breedlove estimated there are a few dozen “major” U.S. overseas bases indispensable to U.S. national security.
Yet there’s no question that the U.S. investment in defense and its international military footprint has been expanding for decades.
When the Korean War came to an end in 1953, eight years before President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in his farewell address of a growing military-industrial complex, the Pentagon was spending about 11% of GDP, or $300 billion, on the military, according to the Defense Department and a manual calculation by USA TODAY. Today the Pentagon easily allocates more than twice as much on defense spending each year, adjusted for inflation, even if the overall budgetary figure represents a far lower percentage of U.S. GDP at just 3%.
Even as the U.S. spends more on defense, some experts say the U.S. military has been operating under a national security strategy that is remarkably unchanged since World War II and thus is ill-suited to newer, more dynamic threats.
“A lot of our military presence around the world is now really just out of habit,” said Benjamin H. Friedman, policy director of Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank that advocates for a smaller world role for the U.S. military. “If at one point there was a strategic justification for it, often it no longer has it.”
David H. Friedman, policy director of Defense Priorities
A lot of our military presence around the world is now really just out of habit. If at one point there was a strategic justification for it, often it no longer has it.
Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. David Barno and political scientist Nora Bensahel recently suggested the Defense Department should prepare for smaller budgets as money is shifted to other priorities.
“The pandemic has suddenly and vividly demonstrated that a large, forward deployed military cannot effectively protect Americans from non-traditional threats to their personal security and the American way of life,” they wrote on the foreign policy website War on the Rocks. “In a deeply interconnected world, geography matters far less, and the security afforded by America’s far-flung military forces has been entirely irrelevant in this disastrous crisis.”
One stark illustration of how U.S. national security priorities may be out of sync with the times: Since 9/11, wars and various American anti-terrorism raids and military activity around the world have taken the lives of more than 7,000 U.S. troops and cost the federal government $6.4 trillion, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project.
As bad as that is, in less than 5% of that time, the coronavirus pandemic has accounted for more than 70 times the human toll as the U.S. exceeds 500,000 dead – also with at least a $6 trillion price tag, according to an analysis of Congress and Federal Reserve allocations. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that the pandemic has cost the U.S. at least $8 trillion.)
But preventing such deaths may not simply be a matter of taking money away from the Pentagon but shifting focus within it.
For instance, White House senior COVID-19 adviser Andy Slavitt announced Feb. 5 that more than 1,000 active-duty troops would begin supporting vaccination sites around the U.S.
Tom Spoehr, a retired Army lieutenant general and defense expert at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank, notes that the U.S. military has helped with international disease outbreaks in the past.
After an Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, the Pentagon sent troops, supplies and contractors to help stem a disease that killed more than 11,000 people and cost the economies of Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia an estimated $53 billion.
“We don’t have the luxury of just saying, ‘OK, the military wasn’t that useful last year so we’re going to turn it in and get an army of doctors instead,” Spoehr said.
Spoehr said it’s important the U.S. takes a wide view of national security that encompasses conflict and terrorism as well as pandemics, climate change and cybersecurity and overseas bases and troops have a role to play.
In 2017, the Trump administration dropped the Obama administration’s designation of climate change as a national security threat. The omission came even though many members of Congress, U.N. Security Council principals, U.S. allies and dozens of security think tanks and research institutes say climate poses a potentially “catastrophic” threat to national and global security. (In one of his first executive orders, Biden re-elevated climate change as a national security priority.)
The World Health Organization estimates that climate change – ranging from insidious heat to flooding – already contributes to about 150,000 global deaths each year. Mark Carney, United Nations envoy for climate action and finance, has warned that the world is heading for death rates equivalent to the COVID-19 pandemic every year by the middle of this century unless drastic action is taken.
Along with wildfires, hurricanes and droughts, these natural disasters destabilize countries, including the U.S., by causing disease, food shortages, social and political instability and mass migration.
After the uncharacteristic winter storm paralyzed Texas, White House homeland security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall issued a warning.
“Climate change is real and it’s happening now, and we’re not adequately prepared for it,” she said. “The infrastructure is not built to withstand these extreme conditions.”
The U.S. military, too, is not immune to climate consequences.
The Union of Concerned Scientists, a science advocacy group based in Boston, reported that the Pentagon is on the front lines of rising sea levels as climate-driven trends “complicate operations at certain coastal installations,” including 128 bases in the U.S. valued at about $100 billion.
Still, Brad Bowman, a former U.S. Army officer and West Point professor, noted that the U.S. military is not a “Swiss Army knife” that can address every single threat. “It’s a bit of a ‘straw man'” argument to criticize it for threats it was not designed to meet, said the former national security adviser to members of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees.
“Just because the American military can’t solve every problem, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t useful for some problems,” he said.
Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that while challenges such as climate change and pandemics “have arisen, the other ones have not abated.” He said Russia is working on “highly sophisticated weapons and has completely reformed its military and for the first time since the end of the Cold War is operating submarines off of our East Coast. Iran is developing highly precise missiles. North Korea’s (nuclear) programs are ongoing. The Chinese are continuing their military buildup.”
On the whole, China’s overseas military posture is relatively small.
China’s official defense budget for 2020 was $178 billion, and Beijing has shown far less interest in matching the Pentagon’s military arsenal and more concern about moving from an imitator to an innovator in biotechnologies, finance, advanced computing, robotics, artificial intelligence, aerospace, cybersecurity and other high-tech areas.
China, along with India, is now the world’s No. 1 producer of undergraduates with science and engineering degrees, accounting for about a quarter of such degrees globally, according to a U.N. report in 2018. The U.S. accounted for 6% of the total.
In a further sign of how China views future battlefields, Beijing is attempting to resurrect and expand the Silk Road, the ancient trade route that once ran between China and the West. China’s Belt and Road Initiative is a multitrillion-dollar undertaking that involves helping build – often through loans – thousands of highways, railways, ports and industrial corridors across more than 60 nations. The project is aimed at forging an unrivaled economic security umbrella for China all over the world.
“China’s playing a totally different game to the U.S.,” said William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C. “The U.S. is relying on traditional military bases, global military reach and training local militaries, while China is forging ahead by cutting economic deals that appear to be buying them more influence than the U.S.’s military approach.”
Beijing also is building militarized outposts on disputed islands in the South China Sea, and the Pentagon believes it is adding overseas bases in Pakistan and possibly the western Pacific. China has recently expanded an Arctic research program that former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said is a “Trojan horse” for its military.
To match the Chinese, Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the U.S. needs to expand its naval fleet – including investments in robotic surface and underwater vessels. He said the U.S. needs to master new technologies from artificial intelligence to wearable electronics.
Biden, for his part, has promised to make cybersecurity a priority for his White House after one of the most massive cyberattacks ever was revealed in December.
For months, Russian government hackers known by the nicknames APT29 or Cozy Bear were able to breach the Treasury and Commerce departments, along with other U.S. government agencies. The same Russian group hacked the State Department and White House email servers during the Obama administration. The December hackers targeted an IT company used by all five branches of the U.S. military.
A bipartisan Senate investigation also found that Russia engaged in a sophisticated campaign to sow division ahead of the 2016 election, which included hackers affiliated with Russian military intelligence infiltrating Democratic National Committee emails and spreading false information on social media about Hillary Clinton.
The Defense Department conceded that it needs to adapt to a changing threat landscape and has strengthened U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, units actively waging covert programs to try to stop Chinese, Iranian and Russian hackers. It could be that physical American military infrastructure abroad is relevant in this regard.
But the threat from cyberattacks remains grave and growing.
From 2005 to 2020, the U.S. government, public networks and private companies were targeted in cyberattacks 135 times by Chinese, Russian and other state actors, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
To be sure, the U.S. faces major traditional military threats as well as intense competition from authoritarian foes in China and Russia.
There is the potential for American adversaries in Iran and North Korea to develop nuclear weapons and target the U.S., or for foreign militant groups to attempt a terrorist attack on U.S. soil reminiscent of 9/11.
A U.S. Navy helicopter is seen shortly after landing on the USS Farragut, in the Persian Gulf, in November 2019.Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY
U.S. military spending and overseas bases are a legacy of post-World War II leaders who decided to “never again allow the U.S. to ignore a problem until it comes to our doorstep,” said Spoehr, the former Army lieutenant general.
He said that by placing U.S. troops around the world, whether in Iraq or Italy (home to more than 14,000 American military personnel), there is a “tripwire effect” that demonstrates American resolve to defend allies and, chiefly, itself.
Many policymakers and military officials agree that the large overseas military presence is about deterrence. They argue the U.S. requires a strong military able to quickly react to crises in difficult-to-access places.
“Physics is physics. That’s not changed,” said Breedlove, the former NATO commander.
“A U.S. fighter aircraft, even stationed in Italy, takes many hours and aerial refueling to fly to most places in Africa. They don’t magic from one point to another,” he added, referring to U.S.-led counterterrorism activity in Africa, the Middle East and beyond.
Breedlove said that since 2012, when U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed in a terrorist attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, the Pentagon has reaffirmed its view that it needs U.S. troops “close to a problem.” A House Select Committee report on the episode concluded the U.S. military was too slow to respond to the assault.
For some, the benefits of a large foreign military presence easily outweigh the costs.
“If the price of preventing another 9/11 is keeping some troops in Afghanistan or elsewhere indefinitely, I’d say that’s a good investment for the American people,” said Bowman, the former West Point professor. “If, on the other hand, our goal was to create a Switzerland in Afghanistan, we obviously failed. However, that was never the goal.”
Brad Bowman, a former national security advisor to members of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees
If the price of preventing another 9/11 is keeping some troops in Afghanistan or elsewhere indefinitely, I’d say that’s a good investment for the American people.
Afghanistan is a particularly hot flash point in this debate.
The 19-year-old conflict has cost more than $2 trillion and more than 2,300 American lives. More than 38,000 Afghan civilians have been killed. And yet the Taliban controls vast swaths of the country, which continues to be wracked by violence despite U.S.-brokered peace talks.
The toll in all major post-9/11 war zones over the past two decades is even more staggering. About 800,000 people – allied troops, opposition fighters, civilians, contractors, journalists, humanitarian aid workers – have been killed and 37 million people displaced, according to Brown’s Costs of War project.
“In all these wars the U.S. has expended so much in terms of blood and treasure with actually very little to show for it,” said Hartung of the Center for International Policy. “A reckoning is near.”
It’s difficult to point to a single location where a post-9/11 U.S. military intervention has led to either a thriving democracy or measurably reduced terrorism, he said.
Post 9/11 warVeronica Bravo, AFP
For some, U.S. wars after 9/11 have complicated the legacy of America’s status as a post-World War II guardian of international values and order, and they worry that U.S. military assertiveness can compound problems.
“To me, a national security threat is an existential threat to the homeland. In fact, from what I saw, the U.S. presence in Iraq exacerbated the threat to the homeland,” said an American official who was a civilian contractor for Iraq’s transitional government after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. This person did not want to be named because of his current government job.
“All the dysfunction, the abuse, our inability to hold the country together. It made it worse,” he said, referring to a litany of persistent allegations about the behavior of American soldiers in Iraq that include torturing prisoners and terrorism suspects. Many security experts believe this alleged behavior directly contributed to the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq.
Further, according to a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, domestic right-wing extremists were responsible for almost 70% of terrorist attacks and plots in the U.S. in 2020, a figure that casts some doubt on the appropriateness of maintaining hundreds of military bases and tens of thousands of troops abroad in the face of a growing national security threat at home.
In the wake of the attacks at the Capitol on Jan. 6, the Biden administration has ordered a review of the threat from domestic violent extremism for precisely that reason.
The Defense Department referred USA TODAY’s questions on national security to the White House. A national security official in the Biden administration said the White House had nothing new to share about overseas troop posture. White House officials in the former Trump administration did not respond to a request for comment.
“The U.S. needs to break with the ‘world’s policeman’ concept,” said Gates, who was defense secretary during most of the Iraq War under Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush.
Gates said the U.S. needs to “be modest about what it can accomplish through military force” and strengthen its diplomacy and “positive economic tools and instruments.”
Even the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently said the U.S. should rethink its large permanent troop levels in dangerous parts of the world, where they could be vulnerable if regional conflicts flare up.
The U.S. needs an overseas presence, but it should be “episodic,” not permanent, Milley said in December. “Large permanent U.S. bases overseas might be necessary for rotational forces to go into and out of, but permanently positioning U.S. forces I think needs a significant relook for the future,” Milley said, both because of the high costs and the risk to military families.
US overseas military bases, the sticker shock of expansion since WWII
The U.S. has enjoyed decades of global military dominance, but some defense experts now argue America’s overseas military might may not be worth it.
staff video, USA TODAY
And yet, almost every attempt by former President Donald Trump over the past four years to deliver on his campaign promise to stop “America’s endless wars” was met with fierce bipartisan backlash, with lawmakers citing the need to stand by America’s allies, check aggression from Russia and China, and keep terrorists at bay.
When Trump announced a drawdown in Syria, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, usually a Trump loyalist, called it “a stain on America’s honor.” When Trump called for a redeployment of U.S. troops stationed in Germany, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., denounced it as “dangerously misguided.” And as Trump pushed for further withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan – American’s longest war – Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned that “premature” exit would be tantamount to surrender.
“It would be reminiscent of the humiliating American departure from Saigon in 1975,” the GOP leader said, a reference to when then-North Vietnam handed the U.S. one of its most crushing military defeats.
Indeed, Biden may be inclined to reverse some of Trump’s military redeployment decisions, based on his own vision of American security shaped by four decades in Washington. Biden will almost certainly consider, for example, the repercussions of the Obama administration’s decision to withdraw from Iraq in 2011, which helped create a vacuum for the rise of ISIS.
Even as Trump cut U.S. troops levels in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria to the bone, he also added at least 14,000 troops to the Middle East to confront Iran, a consequence of rising tensions after his administration’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal.
And while it’s not yet clear how many bases, if any, were shuttered under Trump, since 2016 he opened additional bases in Afghanistan, Estonia, Cyprus, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Niger, Norway, Palau, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Somalia, Syria and Tunisia, according to data from the Pentagon and Vine.
The U.S. Space Force, established by Trump in December 2019, already has a squadron of 20 airmen stationed at Qatar’s Al-Udeid Air Base, as well as overseas facilities for missile surveillance in Greenland, the United Kingdom, Ascension Island in the Pacific Ocean and in the Diego Garcia militarized atoll in the Indian Ocean, according to Stars and Stripes magazine, a U.S. military newspaper.
The Trump administration instructed the Pentagon to shift emphasis from counterterrorism and toward competition with China and Russia.
Whether or not Biden continues on this path, U.S. military activity from 2018 to 2020 shows there has not been a corresponding drawdown of counterterrorism resources and operations to meet that goal, according to research by Stephanie Savell, a defense and security researcher for the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute.
From 2018 to 2020, the U.S. military was active in counterterrorism operations in 85 countries, either directly or via surrogates, training exercises, drone strikes or low-profile U.S. special operations forces missions, according to Savell.
Even where the U.S. military does not have troops or bases, it uses proxies and drones to surveil and sometimes remotely launch missiles against suspected terrorists.
In 2019, the U.S.-led coalition backing the Afghan government against Taliban insurgents dropped more bombs and missiles from warplanes and drones than in any other year of the war dating to 2001. Warplanes fired 7,423 weapons in 2019, according to Air Force data. The previous record was set in 2018, when 7,362 weapons were dropped. In 2016, the last year of the Obama administration, that figure was 1,337.
Department of Defense/Veronica Bravo
Those foreign engagements have become less accountable, Savell said. Congress didn’t even know the extent of the U.S. presence in Africa a few years ago when four Army special operations soldiers were killed in Niger.
U.S. activity ranges from combat in Kenya to war games in Tajikistan and raises fresh questions about the meaning of ending “endless wars” if America’s military is routinely engaged in foreign military theaters.
Critics say it is also evidence the Pentagon continues to use force in places that extend beyond the original intent of the 2001 Authorization of Military Force (AUMF), the law that sprung from President George W. Bush’s “global war on terror” and the invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11.
That 2001 authorization has been stretched to target militant groups in Syria, Pakistan and the Philippines, as well as al-Shabaab in Kenya and Somalia and beyond.
Savell said the U.S. should consider whether there are “more effective, nonmilitary alternatives that cost fewer lives and less taxpayer dollars to address this security challenge.”
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., agrees.
“No member of Congress who voted for (AUMF) could have conceived that it would be used to justify action against groups that didn’t even exist yet in places like the Philippines and Niger,” he said.
America’s military is also routinely criticized for waste.
One example: For more than 50 years the Pentagon was legally required to ship U.S. coal from Pennsylvania to Germany 4,000 miles away to heat its military facilities there despite Germany having one of the highest levels of energy efficiency among advanced economies. The official U.S. national security explanation was that it was dangerous for the Pentagon to rely on energy from Russia, but Pennsylvania lawmakers also saw an opportunity to subsidize a dying industry, according to a federal watchdog.
The “Coal to Kaiserlautern” program, as it was dubbed, ended only in 2019, according to Taxpayers for Commons Sense, a Washington watchdog group.
Dan Grazier, a former Marine Corps captain who served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, said that when deployed he often observed what appeared to be reckless and indefensible spending by the U.S. military, such as the shipping of outsize training equipment manned by expensive contractors to remote locations only for it to be hardly used.
Grazier, now a fellow at The Project On Government Oversight, which investigates federal waste and corruption, said he believes the U.S. is guilty of failing to see issues from the perspective of other nations.
“Put it this way,” Grazier said: “How crazy do you think people in the U.S. would get if the Russians suddenly opened military bases in Canada? We would lose our minds over that. Yet that’s exactly what we’re doing by placing, for example, U.S. troops in the Baltic states in Europe” as part of NATO deployments.
A street corner on “American Alley,” in Bahrain. Photo date: November 2019.Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY
In fact, while some analysts have argued that Russian territorial aggression in Ukraine justifies NATO expansion in Eastern Europe, others have concluded that were it not for the persistent buildup of NATO forces near Russia’s borders, President Vladimir Putin may not have decided to occupy Crimea and other parts of Ukraine.
America’s military reach can foment smaller resentments.
Mark Gillem, a former U.S. Air Force officer and now architecture professor at the University of Oregon, said large overseas bases amount to “mini-Americas”: expansive, car-friendly, costly to run, and often plagued by negative environmental, social and geopolitical consequences.
“When the U.S. comes in and takes a lot of land it creates problems. In many places, people aren’t necessarily anti-American. They are anti-American sprawl,” Gillem said.
Back in Bahrain, the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet base helps to stave off disruptive Iranian activity on a vital trade route where ships transport billions of dollars worth of oil every day. It’s not difficult to grasp the connection between sabotaged oil tankers and the price Americans pay at the pump. About 4,500 Americans are permanently stationed there.
“It’s good for business. But all these Americans erase some of who we are, our culture,” said a Bahraini man who was sitting with a group of taxi drivers in the shade of a tree observing the U.S. military personnel as they enjoyed some down time on “American Alley.”
The man did not want to be identified for fear of it hurting his job. Many of his clients are Americans.
Contributing: Deirdre Shesgreen, Tom Vanden Brook; Graphics by George Petras; Photo illustrations by Veronica Bravo; Photos by AP, Getty images
One of the downsides of working in games media is that it’s hard to be too precious about things like completions. The nature of the job means that I’ve ended up with my account showing hundreds of games with difficult (if not now-impossible) 1Ks, games I have no interest in returning to, and games I never would have played in the first place had some kindly soul not paid me to do so. Sure, I could have set up a second account for stuff I didn’t want on my main tag, but that would have meant a second Live sub, plus that ship sailed for me years ago and I’ve pretty much made my peace with it. My completion percentage may forever be in the gutter, then, but that doesn’t mean I’m not keen to give it a bit of a boost when the right game comes along. I initially started up Cyber Shadow with the intention of putting together a quick Game Pass First Impressions piece last week before other stuff got in the way, and I didn’t take a look at the list before I fired it up. I definitely should have done. I am an idiot.
Wearing its 8-bit inspiration on its sleeve as it does, Cyber Shadow was never going to be an easy game to get through even casually. But after the first achievement popped at the end of Chapter 1 and I audibly muttered ‘oh no’ to myself at the 16G reward, I figured it was time to finally check out the list. Oh no indeed. Not only does the entire list consist of 16G, 31G, and 91G achievements, but it’s also only, like, an unobtainable and a grind achievement away from filling out an entire ‘evil achievement’ bingo sheet. Speedrun achievement? Check. 100% achievement? Of course, and one for 0%, too. Collectables? By the dozen. Missables? You know it, and plenty of ’em. Deathless achievement? Obviously. It’s one mean list, and I initially had no interest in going for the completion. But as the game opened up and its wonderful retro aesthetic, tight gameplay, and killer soundtrack drew me in, I slowly came around to the idea. Not only that, but I still wanted to give it some love on the site, although having missed the boat on both a first impressions piece and a review by that point, we’d have to get a little creative to do so. Thus, The Road to 1K was born — part review, part guide, part diary, and all in all, just a (hopefully) fun new way to shine a light on games we on staff are loving and trying to complete, but which we might not otherwise be able to cover. There may be a few ‘spoilers’ in terms of game content, in case you’re bothered by that kind of thing. Well, with the explanation bit out of the way, let’s get into it…
Session one: 0-363G
I was actually tempted to call it a day when that first 16G achievement popped, since it rounded out my score for the first time in ages. Still, a combination of wanting to cover the game in some way and curiosity to see more drove me onwards in spite of all the awkward numbers that were bound to follow. Looking at the stats on-site, I certainly wouldn’t have been the first to tap out there — Saving the clan, that first achievement I unlocked, has been earned by 97% of TA players, while the achievement for completing Chapter 2, Rise to the challenge, drops way down to just 47%. Turns out there were several more I could have unlocked before my first, too, as every boss has its own achievement for defeating it under certain conditions. Even after checking the list, this still managed to throw me off, as they’re not listed in the order they appear in the game. Also, I wasn’t going to go out of my way to try and get these during my ‘casual’ first run, since it was clear from the list that it was realistically going to take at least three full runs (100%, 0%, speedrun) to grab the lot, so there’d be plenty of chances to mop up later.
Looking at timestamps, it took me about 45 minutes to get through the second level (kinda embarrassing considering I can now do it in about ten), mostly due to the fact that instant death is only ever one wrong input away there. With limited recovery options early on, one tap from an enemy can send you tumbling into pits, spikes, or acid, and sent unceremoniously back to the last checkpoint. Each of these can be powered up with the currency you find to offer better recovery and even free items, though you need to be careful with the latter as buying the items can sometimes make the boss-specific achievements (notably Focused effort for beating the Chapter 3 mid-boss without destroying its turrets) much harder. Difficulty in general ramps up pretty quickly — damage is high, instant death hazards prevalent, and the learning curve steep. But from the end of Chapter 3 onwards, Cyber Shadow starts throwing amazing tools your way. Airstrike might seem like a simple downwards attack but it’s actually an extremely useful movement tool for adding height and distance to jumps, or recovering from hits. And as a huge Street Fighter III: Third Strike fan, I was delighted to unlock the parry, replete with the exact same input of tapping forward to deflect incoming blows (if only projectiles here). An oh, how I parried. I unlocked the No you achievement for parrying 50 times less than ten minutes after unlocking the ability, but what can I say? I just bloody love parrying.
As the difficulty continued to snowball, I pressed on. A few parts had me wanting to hurl my controller into the sea (the bike section towards the end is rough until you know the enemy and hazard patterns, and a couple of the later bosses worked me over pretty hard), but generally speaking, the satisfaction of eventually overcoming these obstacles made all that hardship worthwhile. As soon as you unlock Charge and pop Overpowered, Cyber Shadow turns into a completely different game. You don’t just run and jump any more — you soar. It’s a little overwhelming to have all of your abilities boosted at once, but once you learn how to chain it all together, it’s stupidly rewarding to just string dash slashes together, ground underfoot or no, and blitz entire sections in seconds. If you thought the game had some cool risk/reward stuff going on when it gave you a parry, just you wait until it breaks out the good stuff later on. One mistake can ruin everything so the stakes are high if you want to go fast, and you will. It’s just that much fun.
Before too long, I found myself at the last boss (read: three bosses, back-to-back). The first is pretty much free as it’s a rematch with a familiar face, but the second and third have some pretty novel mechanics which take a bit of working out. I took a bunch of intentional deaths here to start over when things went south early, but got there in the end. Ten hours and 550 deaths (at least 50 of which were intentional wipes on that last boss rush) after starting the game, I had reached the credits, and stayed up way too long doing so. Before bed, I decided to dive back in on a new file while I was still in the zone, to see how the two achievements related to the first mini-boss — Pacifist, for reaching Smasher without killing anything, and Smashing for beating it without destroying the turrets in the area — were. The answer was ‘absolutely fine,’ as it turns out, and I had both done within 15 minutes. With my first clear done and over a third of the Gamerscore earned in one sitting, it was time to finally hit the sack, dozing off with that banging soundtrack still echoing around in my head. But it was only just beginning. The real Cyber Shadow starts here…
Session two: 363-532G
Sitting down for my second session, my main objective was to round up the collectables I missed first time. I went out of my way during my initial run to jump between checkpoints and grab the few I knew were there once I had the relevant abilities, so that didn’t leave too many. One in particular cost me a lot of time and deaths — the very one guarded by the rude mini-boss in the image above, actually. You’ve likely faced this thing a few times by the time you reach this one, and while the fight itself is basically the same, the arena here means you need to approach it in a much cleaner and safer way unless you enjoy falling to your death. I do not. I really do not. The enemies on the platforms can be removed with dash slashes or charged shots from the checkpoint power-up, but the balls that orbit the boss can be a little erratic and while parrying and reflecting its projectiles is extremely effective, it’s also likely to lead to a death if you fluff the input or get crossed up and end up pressing the wrong direction. Again, got there in the end, leaving just one of each upgrade to find and with both in Chapter 6. These took a while to find, but I did find a bunch of really cool secret areas in the process, one full of chatty robot friends, and another a clear reference to Super Mario Bros.’ warp areas and even discovered in the same way — by running over the top of a section of the visible level — which offered a selection of power-ups for reaching it. I grabbed the Swag Blade (which very much lives up to its name, by the way) and continued my search, eventually managing to find and collect the last two things I was missing within five minutes of one another.
Just getting 100% collection rate isn’t enough, though. The game specifically demands a 100% completion for the 100% achievement, so I’d need to go and say hello to that trio of bosses one more time. Okay, a few more times. Things can go wrong very easily in the second and third phases. On my way back, I noticed something interesting to return to once the bosses had been dealt with, so a few runs later when I was 91G better off from my 100% clear, I did just that. There’s a room just before the final fight where a couple of respawning enemies appear with staggered timing, perfect for preventing their tracking projectiles and bouncing between them to earn the Airtime achievement for staying off the ground for 30 seconds. I messed around with this for a bit and eventually got it down to a science (I can defy gravity there endlessly now, should the need ever arise), and after getting the achievement, I noticed this one didn’t have a guide on TA yet so I decided to call it a day there, take a few pics, and throw together a quick guide to inform others of this fantastic risk-free spot. Only four achievements down, but I came away with a much better feel for game mechanics, and with one of the big ones ticked off, so I’ll take it.
Session three: 532-691G
I am no master strategist, and my third time loading into the game ended up being split across my original save and three new files: a new ‘normal’ run to get the boss achievements while learning the game some more, a 0% file in which I wouldn’t be able to fall back on health and SP boosts, and a burner file for attempting the deathless run. After grabbing two relatively easy achievements I’d missed on my main save, the boss run took priority, as learning the early game would be essential for the other two runs. One by one, I beat those bosses again while meeting the achievement conditions, and I was able to make it as far as Chapter 4 mid-boss Mekadragon pretty easily. Dry socks, unlocked by beating this boss without ever touching the water, tripped me up hard (I struggled with this guy’s unpredictability even casually), so I took this as my cue to start up my 0% run. Which, actually, went a lot smoother than I expected. Experience in the early game really paid off, and I managed to make it to the end of Chapter 3 with only two deaths, both to the tank mini-boss. Inspired by this, I tapped out when I reached Mekadragon (seriously, screw that jerk) and decided to go for the deathless run.
This doesn’t need to be a full completion, rather you just have to reach the dojo shortly after the end of Chapter 3 without taking a death to unlock it. Based on my 0% run, that seemed perfectly doable, so I went for it. Within a few attempts, I was consistently getting deep into Chapter 2 or even 3 before biting the dust and starting over… both stages punish mistakes hard and are rough to go back to when you’re used to having the recovery options of endgame at your disposal. I’m told you can quickly quit out and reload if you see a death coming early enough, but I’m not doing that. I want to earn this legitimately, and I know I can do it. Back-to-back ‘almost’ runs (both of which were entirely on me, like most deaths are in Cyber Shadow) led me to take a quick break and go back to my original save to pick up two of the three remaining achievements there — Don’t touch the paint, for beating that horrible bike section without taking damage, can wait until another run, as getting back to the trigger point is a pain. With those out of the way, I went back to trying Live forever, but with tiredness setting in and leading to sloppy play, it seemed like this should be saved for another time as well. I’ve been so close I could taste it on several occasions now and can beat all six bosses flawlessly, so I just need to hold together a decent run (read: not fall in holes like a chump) and I’ll have this done easily. Next time! Still, nine new achievements was solid progress, so I’m not gonna complain.
Well, that pretty much brings us up to date with my progress with the Cyber Shadow completion so far… 31/40 achievements done, 691/1,000G earned, and a couple more achievements already within spitting distance. The boss run will be a cakewalk as soon as I get Mekadragon down, and that’s five of those checked off right away — six if I can muster the patience to do the bike section one on this run as well, which I probably should. All that will leave is 0%, speedrun, and deathless. Deathless I have on lock, and that’ll come soon, plus that save file will be a great jumping-off point for the speedrun achievement, since I’m consistently getting almost a third of the way through the game in half an hour on my deathless attempts. 0% is the only one that scares me, but checkpoints are generous enough that by the time I hit that one up last, I should be in a good place to give it a proper go. Once I’m closer to my goal and can see myself joining those 13 elite ninjas on TA in earning my Cyber Shadow completion, I’ll be back to tell you more about my failures.
Or maybe not, if you all hate this. It’s something new, so we never know. Let us know in the comments if this was in any way entertaining/helpful/interesting/distracting from the fact that the world is on fire. We like to try out new things but it’s difficult to know how they will land, so your feedback is invaluable. In the meantime, check out Cyber Shadow if you like great games with evil achievement lists. It’s a proper challenge, and I’m loving it…
