Name: Could Russia’s war on Ukraine escalate into a global cyberwar?
Uploaded: 2022-06-12T17:35:36.000Z
Duration: 9 min 16 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

When Russia began amassing troops on Ukraine's border in late 2021, many security experts

predicted a similar build-up of Russian hackers along the ideological boundaries of cyberspace;

Adverbs of manner

ready to match any physical assault with  an equally damaging virtual attack.

The country has proven itself a leading offensive cyber power — whether that be by interfering in

and influencing foreign elections or by mounting cyberattacks on critical infrastructure

such as air traffic control systems  and water treatment facilities.

Yet, months into Moscow's brutal military invasion,

a cyberwar of similar consequence has yet to materialize.

Essentially, Ukraine's digital defense has proved as determined as its physical one.

Before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine,

Russia was harassing Ukraine relentlessly in cyberspace.

Still, the risks of cyberwar have not gone away.

As the world becomes increasingly reliant on technology across all walks of life,

the potential for cyberwarfare to  wreak havoc on society remains —

So, what exactly could a cyberwar entail and how prepared are we?

For the first time in human history,  it's possible to inflict large-scale harm

on another country, from a different country

without anybody ever setting foot  on the territory of that country.

Cyberwarfare can be broadly  defined as an act of aggression

conducted through a digital network  by state-sponsored actors.

The targets can be military or civilian,  but the end goal is to coerce

a sovereign state to bend to the actor's will.

This is different from cyberterrorism, which is typically conducted by independent actors.

It's now, more than ever, critical that we are preparing for such events.

Security experts have been raising  the alarm on such cyber risks for decades.

Back in 2012, then-U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned the country was facing

a potential “cyber-Pearl Harbour,” with the national power grid, transportation,

financial network and government having grown  increasingly vulnerable to foreign hackers.

Britain considered the risks so significant that in 2016,

GCHQ, the country's electronic intelligence and security agency,

launched a unit specifically designed to deal with cyber threats.

Ciaran Martin was the founding CEO of GCHQ's National Cyber Security Centre and is now

a professor at the University of Oxford's Blavatnik School of Government.

There's this sort of Hollywood version of cyber that everything's connected to everything else.

That's not really the way cyber operations work.

But they are really serious, quite pernicious and nasty social and economic threats

from cyberspace, and we need to be realistic  about telling people what they are.

Already, there have been several serious  cyberattacks with wide-reaching consequences —

In 2010, Iran's nuclear facilities were severely disrupted

by a malicious computer worm known as Stuxnet,

in the first known example of a digital weapon  causing physical damage.

Then, in 2017, a mock ransomware attack known as NotPetya brought Ukrainian businesses

to their knees, damaging systems and deleting data, with major knock-on effects internationally.

An accounting organization in Ukraine  was attacked and Maersk had to suffer

a massive fallout as a consequence,  even though they were not the target.

So the challenge with the cyber realm is that you don't necessarily need to be the target,

And roughly one hour before Russia invaded Ukraine, internet access in Ukraine and

swathes of Europe were crippled after a cyberattack

against U.S. satellite communications provider Viasat.

The outage affected the Ukrainian military's ability to communicate with

its frontline troops — a move the West has blamed on Russia.

In the first four months of 2022, Russian hackers launched more than 200 cyberattacks

against Ukraine, targeting government  agencies and private companies,

The report noted that the cyberattacks “have also sought to disrupt people's access

to reliable information and critical life services on which civilians depend.”

However, the intensity of these attacks  by Russia in the cyber realm

have surprised experts,  who were anticipating more.

Is it a lack of kind of ability from  the Russian side?

Or do you think it's just so fundamental to the fact that cyberwar doesn't actually

have the kind of overall impact that  maybe traditional military warfare has?

Firstly, there was the quick victory theory.

If, as it is believed they thought, they were going to take the whole of Ukraine

in three or four days, why would you devastate it  digitally when you're going to be ruling it?

Perhaps at the almost other end of the spectrum of theory, some of the Russian military equipment

seems to have been so poor that Russian  infantry themselves are using GPS,

they're using WhatsApp to communicate,  so if you take out the Ukrainian internet infrastructure,

There is of course then — and I think there definitely is something in this —

that when you're in a period of high tension short of war, cyber is a very, very useful tool.

When you're actually at war, and you can send bomber planes in and so forth,

the complexity and time and resources  of a cyber operation becomes less useful.

That doesn't mean the risks of cyber conflict have faded, however.

No special rules apply in cyber, so if Russia's going to do aggressive behavior,

What is potentially even more concerning is there is a lot of noisy activity in cyberspace

at the moment between Russia and Ukraine, but the way the network world works means

you cannot cauterize that activity necessarily between Russia and Ukraine.

Physical attacks, just by nature,  can be contained a bit.

You know where you're attacking, you can control it to a certain degree.

Unfortunately, that's not the case  when it comes to cyberattacks.

As a result, authorities are now calling for greater efforts to help prevent —

or at least prepare for — potential cyberattacks.

That includes encouraging governments and businesses to work more closely together

to understand their cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

One part of it is ensuring the resilience of government establishments.

I think the other and more important  priority also is to ensure

how are they supporting the private sector in this endeavor.

Public-private cooperation is the key to all this.

In response to rising Russian cyber risks, the U.S. passed a new law in March 2022

requiring owners and operators of critical infrastructure

to report cyber incidents within 72 hours  and ransomware payments within 24 hours.

A year earlier, Russia-based cybercriminals targeted the U.S.'s largest fuel pipeline.

The Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack  resulted in widespread energy shortages