How A Nation Became Russia's Cyberwar Experiment

In Ukraine, the quintessential cyberwar scenario has come to life. Twice. On separate occasions, invisible saboteurs have turned off the electricity to hundreds of thousands of people. 

Each blackout lasted a matter of hours, only as long as it took for scrambling engineers to manually switch the power on again. 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.

The blackouts weren’t just isolated attacks. They were part of a digital blitzkrieg that has pummeled Ukraine for the past three years, a sustained cyber-¬assault unlike any the world has ever seen. 

A hacker army has systematically undermined practically every sector of Ukraine: media, finance, transportation, military, politics, energy. Wave after wave of intrusions have deleted data, destroyed computers, and in some cases paralysed organisations’ most basic functions. “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 cyber-security.

In a public statement in December, Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, reported that there had been 6,500 cyber-attacks on 36 Ukrainian targets in just the previous two months. International cyber-security 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 cyber-war against our country.” 

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. 
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. For all those reasons, Moscow has worked for generations to keep Ukraine in the position of a submissive smaller sibling.

But over the past decade and a half, Moscow’s leash on Ukraine has frayed, as popular support in the country has pulled toward NATO and the European Union. In 2004, Ukrainian crowds in orange scarves flooded the streets to protest Moscow’s rigging of the country’s elections; that year, Russian agents allegedly went so far as to poison the surging pro-Western presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko. 

A decade later, the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution finally overthrew the country’s Kremlin-¬backed president, Viktor Yanukovych (a leader whose longtime political adviser, Paul Manafort, would go on to run the US presidential campaign of Donald Trump). Russian troops promptly annexed the Crimean Peninsula in the south and invaded the Russian, speaking eastern region known as Donbass. Ukraine has since then been locked in an un-declared war with Russia, one that has displaced nearly 2 million internal refugees and killed close to 10,000 Ukrainians.
“Russia will never accept a sovereign, independent Ukraine. Twenty-¬five years since the Soviet collapse, Russia is still sick with this imperialistic syndrome.”

From the beginning, one of this war’s major fronts has been digital. Ahead of Ukraine’s post-revolution 2014 elections, a pro-Russian group calling itself CyberBerkut, an entity with links to the Kremlin hackers who later breached Democratic targets in America’s 2016 presidential election, rigged the website of the country’s Central Election Commission to announce ultra-right presidential candidate Dmytro Yarosh as the winner. 

Administrators detected the tampering less than an hour before the election results were set to be declared. And that attack was just a prelude to Russia’s most ambitious experiment in digital war, the barrage of cyberattacks that began to accelerate in the fall of 2015 and hasn’t ceased since. 

Yushchenko, who ended up serving as Ukraine’s president from 2005 to 2010, believes that Russia’s tactics, online and off, have one single aim: “to destabilize the situation in Ukraine, to make its government look incompetent and vulnerable.” 
He lumps the blackouts and other cyber-attacks together with the Russian disinformation flooding Ukraine’s media, the terroristic campaigns in the east of the country, and his own poisoning years ago, all under-handed moves aimed at painting Ukraine as a broken nation. “Russia will never accept Ukraine being a sovereign and independent country,” says Yushchenko, whose face still bears traces of the scars caused by dioxin toxicity. “Twenty-¬five years since the Soviet collapse, Russia is still sick with this imperialistic syndrome.”

But many global cybersecurity analysts have a much larger theory about the endgame of Ukraine’s hacking epidemic: They believe Russia is using the country as a cyberwar testing ground, a laboratory for perfecting new forms of global online combat. 

Wired:       Henry Jackson School of Intl. Studies:         CBS: 

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