How the tech community has rallied to Ukraine’s cyber-defence
As the conflict in Ukraine escalates, expert cyber-watchers have been speculating about the kind of cyber-attacks that Russia might conduct. Will the Kremlin turn off Ukraine’s power grid, dismantle Ukraine’s transport system, cut off the water supply or target the health system? Or would cybercriminals operating from Russia, who could act as proxies for the Russian regime, conduct these activities?
Over the past decade, Ukraine has experienced many major cyber-attacks, most of which have been attributed to Russia. From election interference in 2014, which compromised the central electoral system and jeopardised the integrity of the democratic process; to a hack and blackout attack in a first-of-its-kind fully remote cyber-attack on a power grid in 2015, resulting in countrywide power outages; to one of the costliest malicious software attacks, NotPetya, in 2017, which significantly disrupted access to banking and government services in Ukraine and, subsequently, spilled over to France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, the UK, the US and Australia.
On the eve of 13 January, as troops were amassing along the Ukrainian border, about 70 Ukrainian government websites were taken down due to “unauthorised interference”, dubbed WhisperGate. The following day, these websites were defaced with a political threat that Ukrainian data had been leaked and with a warning to “be afraid and expect the worst”. The attacks did not stop there. Almost a month later, further denial of service attacks took down government websites and state-owned banking services. The UK, US and Australia were quick to publicly attribute the attacks to Russia, and name and shame the military intelligence arm of the Russian armed forces (GRU) as responsible for
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