Elizabeth Weise

USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO – Nation-state hacks accompanying political disagreements are becoming increasingly common, with breaches hitting power grids, government agencies and U.S. corporations.

“We now see them as part of every single conflict — there’s not a regional or an international conflict that doesn’t have a cyber element to it,” said Adam Segal, director of the digital and cyberspace policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

The indictments against seven Iranians with ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for cyberattacks that disrupted U.S. banking operations and a New York state dam was the latest in a series of these politically linked attacks.

How security pros blunted alleged Iran cyber attacks

Thus far, few nations have the technical expertise to carry out highly destructive state-sponsored cyber attacks, said Segal, whose book, The Hacked World Order: How Nations Fight, Trade, Maneuver, and Manipulate in a Digital Age, came out this month.

The United States, Russia, China, Israel, Germany and France are the most advanced in terms of cyber attack ability, though Iran is “moving up the chain,” he said.

The United States has thus far escaped a major attack due to its strength, he said.

In speech to CEOs, Obama threatens China with retaliation over hacking

“I think the Russians and the Chinese are basically deterred from attacking the United States because they know if they do, we will retaliate,” he said.

All-out cyber warfare is not a question of if, but when, said Segal.

“Not only because the potential opponents are getting better, but also because we’re getting more vulnerable. We have self-driving cars, smart power grids, connected home devices. All of those are new vulnerabilities that aren’t well protected,” he said.

While long-distance attacks via the Internet might seem like something out of an action movie rather than real life, the number of incidents has been growing over the past ten years. Some of the most egregious include:

2015 — Russian launches a cyber attack against the Ukrainian power grid, according to U.S. officials. The attacks caused power outages in 103 cities and towns in the nation. Russia had been involved in military clashes with Ukraine over the Crimea.

2015 — Hackers gain access to a steel mill in Germany, rendering it unable to shut down its blast furnace. This results in massive damage to the foundry. The attack was described in a report by German's Federal Office for Security in Information Technology. The steel mill was not named and no date for the attack was given.

2014 — North Korean hackers destroy the computer network of Sony Pictures Entertainment, according to U.S. officials. The attack is thought to be retaliation for a satirical movie called The Interview, starring Seth Rogen and James Franco, about two bungling journalists who coordinate an assassination of North Korea's Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un.

2014 — Hackers breach the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and steal information about more than 21 million Americans who had been subject to government background checks. U.S. government officials privately blame China. China later arrests several hackers for the attack just before Chinese President Xi Jinping pays a state visit to the United States.

President Xi: China doesn't condone hacking attacks

2014 —Iranian hackers shut down the computer network of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., the world's largest gaming company. The motivation, experts believe, was billionaire owner Sheldon Adelson's remarks about attacking Iran with nuclear weapons if the country didn't put the brakes on its nuclear program.

2013 —Iranian hackers attack the control system of a dam north of New York City. They are able to probe the Bowman Avenue Dam in Rye Brook, NY for vulnerabilities but were not able to gain control over it, U.S. officials said.

2013 — Cyber attacks take down the computer networks of several media companies and banks in South Korea. South Korea says North Korea was behind the attacks,

2011 — 2013 - Iranians employed by two Iranian-based computer firms with ties to the government and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps use cyber attacks to disrupt U.S. banking operations, disabling bank websites, preventing customers from accessing their accounts online and costing the victimized banks tens of millions of dollars, according to U.S. federal prosecutors.

2012 — A computer virus nicknamed Shamoon attacks the Saudi Arabian state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco, erasing data on as many as 30,000 computers and forcing the company to shut down much of its computer network. U.S. officials believe Iran was behind the attack.

2010 — Computer security firms discover Stuxnet, a computer worm created by the United States and Israel to disable Iranian centrifuges used to separate nuclear material and thus cripple Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The worm first appeared in 2009 but wasn’t widely known until 2011. Many in the computer security world believed the Iranian attacks on U.S. banks from 2011 to 2013 were a response to the Stuxnet attack.

2008 —Cyber attackers hit the computer servers of officials in the Georgian government as Russia and Georgia engaged in a shooting war over the breakaway region of South Ossetia. Georgian officials blamed Russia, though Russia said it was not involved.

2007 —Coordinated cyberattacks crash the websites of dozens of Estonian institutions, including its Parliament, banks, ministries and news organizations. The country's foreign minister accuses Russia of being behind the attacks in retaliation over Estonia's moving a Soviet-era grave marker and general movement away from the Russian sphere of influence.

Follow Elizabeth Weise @eweise.