Kaja Kallas says Ukraine is giving the free world a masterclass on cyber-defence

livemint.com:

UN Security Council meeting on cyber-security. Almost everyone at the meeting stressed what all states have already agreed: international law, including the UN Charter in its entirety, applies in cyberspace. Russia did not.

Eight months later, Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and violated every rule in the book. For years, we had heard predictions that the next big war would be a kind of cyber-Armageddon. But instead, Russia brought back large-scale conventional war.

Images of destruction from places like Bucha, where the Russian occupiers tortured and killed civilians, shocked the world. Much of the free world’s response has inevitably focused on conventional war, and rightly so. The aggressor must be defeated on the battlefield, and for that Ukraine needs military support.

But Russia is also waging an energy war, an information war and a cyberwar. Democracies need to take steps to defend themselves in all these areas, as well as holding the line to defend a world where rules still apply, and where technology works for, not against, democratic societies. In this regard, there are four things of which we need to take note, and four things all free nations must do.

First, we need to understand that integrating cyber-warfare into regular warfare is now established practice. An hour before Russian tanks rolled over Ukraine’s border, Russia disrupted Ukraine’s access to Viasat communication satellites. The aim was to leave the Ukrainian armed forces without one of their communications lines, as well as having a broader spill-over effect on broadband services that, for instance, control the remote monitoring of wind turbines in Germany.