Speaking of U.S. responses to hostile states, Reuters offers an intriguing report about a signal sent to Beijing.

The U.S. government in recent months launched an operation to fight a pervasive Chinese hacking operation that successfully compromised thousands of internet-connected devices, according to two Western security officials and one person familiar with the matter.

The Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation sought and received legal authorization to remotely disable aspects of the Chinese hacking campaign, the sources told Reuters.

I’d also note that U.S. Cyber Command — er, allegedly – temporarily shut down the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, Russia, back in 2018. General Paul M. Nakasone, the head of U.S. Cyber Command and the director of the National Security Agency, is vague about what kinds of attacks his organizations can launch, but in a 2021 interview with the New York Times, he said, “before, during and since, with a number of elements of our government, we have taken actions and we have imposed costs.”

Nice Internet operations you’ve got there, Mullahs. Be a shame if something happened to them.

(The last time I said something like that, it was about the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, leading to some speculation that I knew something about a U.S. role in it. Last we heard, the Ukrainians appeared responsible. The books are fictional, people. But well-researched fiction.)