So far no one is winning
to identify who is inside the office building in Kyiv, but the Russians don’t need a nameplate to tell them. Windows on its higher floors are still smashed from a drone attack last summer on the nerve centre of Ukraine’s cyber-defence operations. Both sides are locked in combat to steal intelligence and sow panic by attacking telecommunications, critical infrastructure, military computers and whatever else they can hack into.
This war is being fought in the shadows, says a Ukrainian intelligence official. Last June, he says, “big strikes” shut down petrol stations and internet providers in Russia’s Belgorod and Rostov regions; but few outsiders noticed and the Russian authorities said nothing about it. Tim Karpinsky, head of the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance, a “hacktivist community”, says that many Ukrainians and Russians, including vast criminal networks, once worked together inand cyber.
Big Russian attacks a decade ago were wake-up calls. In 2015 hackers infiltrated power-station systems and turned off the electricity for several hours in parts of western Ukraine. Kyiv’s grid was attacked a year later. In June 2017 banks, energy companies and government computers were clobbered, writes an analyst, David Kirichenko, in a new report. Data from 10% of computers across Ukraine were erased, he says, causing widespread disruption.
In December, in the biggest single successful strike of the war, Russian hackers took down Kyivstar, Ukraine’s largest mobile and internet provider, shutting down services for several days. Standing in front of a large screen, Major Yurii Myronenko, head of the State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection of Ukraine , points at graphs detailing who is responsible. His outfit comes under the security services, so he is in uniform.
Mr Kirichenko says that when the invasion of 2022 began experts feared a “digital Pearl Harbour”; but Ukraine’s defences remarkably “stood firm”. Now, he warns, “the Russia-Ukraine cyberwar is becoming more aggressive than ever and will continue to expand in the future to potentially more devastating critical…targets.”