![]() Moscow has long regarded Ukraine as both a rightful part of Russia’s empire and an important territorial asset-a strategic buffer between Russia and the powers of NATO, a lucrative pipeline route to Europe, and home to one of Russia’s few accessible warm-water ports. To grasp the significance of these assaults-and, for that matter, to digest much of what’s going on in today’s larger geopolitical disorder-it helps to understand Russia’s uniquely abusive relationship with its largest neighbor to the west. International cybersecurity analysts have stopped just short of conclusively attributing these attacks to the Kremlin, but Poroshenko didn’t hesitate: Ukraine’s investigations, he said, point to the “direct or indirect involvement of secret services of Russia, which have unleashed a cyberwar against our country.” (The Russian foreign ministry didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.) In a public statement in December, Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, reported that there had been 6,500 cyberattacks on 36 Ukrainian targets in just the previous two months. “You can’t really find a space in Ukraine where there hasn’t been an attack,” says Kenneth Geers, a NATO ambassador who focuses on cybersecurity. Wave after wave of intrusions have deleted data, destroyed computers, and in some cases paralyzed organizations’ most basic functions. A hacker army has systematically undermined practically every sector of Ukraine: media, finance, transportation, military, politics, energy. They were part of a digital blitzkrieg that has pummeled Ukraine for the past three years-a sustained cyberassault unlike any the world has ever seen. But as proofs of concept, the attacks set a new precedent: In Russia’s shadow, the decades-old nightmare of hackers stopping the gears of modern society has become a reality.Īnd the blackouts weren’t just isolated attacks. Each blackout lasted a matter of hours, only as long as it took for scrambling engineers to manually switch the power on again. On separate occasions, invisible saboteurs have turned off the electricity to hundreds of thousands of people. Now, in Ukraine, the quintessential cyberwar scenario has come to life. ![]()
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