From disinformation to election hacking to attacking trains and banks, the Kremlin tested it all in Ukraine.
By
Oleh Derevianko was on the road to
his parents’ village in Ukraine on a bright June day in 2017 when he got
a call from the CEO of a telecommunications company. Computer systems
were failing at Oschadbank, one of the largest banks in Ukraine, and the
CEO suspected a cyberattack. Could Derevianko’s digital security firm
investigate? Derevianko told his response team to look into it and kept
driving. Then his phone buzzed again. And again. Something big was
happening.
Across Ukraine that day, cash registers suddenly shut down. People
trying to withdraw money saw ransom demands appear on ATM screens.
Lawmakers in the country’s parliament could not access their laptops.
Turnstiles in Kiev’s subway stopped working, and departure boards at the
airport went down. Technicians at Chernobyl, the site of the deadly
nuclear disaster in 1986, had to manually check radiation levels after
their computers failed.
It became clear to Derevianko that this was no random malware. It was
an act of cyberwar—the latest digital attack from Russia. The Kremlin
had previously targeted Ukraine with information warfare, using social platforms to spread propaganda
that exploited ethnic divisions. It had launched cyberattacks on
election systems and the power grid. But this attack was the biggest one
yet—designed to simultaneously bring down multiple systems to create
maximum chaos.
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Source: Mother Jones
An Exclusive 2017 Investigative Report by 'The G-Man Interviews': The Cyber-Attack on Ukraine (Is America Next?)
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