Cybersecurity
As military investment in cyberwarfare explodes, some analysts and experts are fi nding that cyber may be of limited use when it comes to deterrence and coercion, even as bad actors like China and Russia seek make full use of it to push their objectives forward. Nicholas Kenny looks into recent reports that ask whether or not expectations have been set too high in this area.
Cyber struggles T
he world grows more and more dependent on digital technologies every day. But, as it does, so too does it become increasingly vulnerable to bad actors. Over the past decade or so, militaries around the world have embraced the task of adapting to this new frontier, and recent conflicts – such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine – has seen the importance of this theatre of war blow up. Nations around the world have taken up aggressive cyberattacks to help further their interests, but few have done so with as much vim and vigour as Russia. Gavin Wilde, senior fellow in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said in a December article that, in many ways, February 2022 was the culmination of “one of the most long-running and extensive information assaults by one state on another in history”, going as far to consider Ukraine as “Russia’s testing ground for offensive cyber and information operations – primarily to wage political warfare”.
State-sanctioned cyberwarfare Prior to that culmination, however, Moscow carried out a number of offensive cyber operations geared at weakening Ukraine and its allies throughout Europe. In 2016, Russia launched one of the most damaging cyberattacks in history, aimed primarily at Ukrainian companies to disrupt the nation’s financial system as it waged war against Russian-backed separatists. This virus, NotPetya, took its name from its resemblance to the criminal ransomware Petya, which extorted victims by demanding they pay for a key to unlock their hacked files. While NotPetya also sent a ransom message, this was a misdirection – regardless of payment or not, no such key existed to unscramble the encryption. The goal of this malware, then, was purely destructive, irreversibly bricking its victims’ computers. Ultimately, the virus wreaked more than $10bn in total damages, according to former Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert, who at the time of the attack served as President Trump’s most senior cybersecurity-focused official. NotPetya hit at
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Defence & Security Systems International /
www.defence-and-security.com
Aleksandar Malivuk/
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