A Timeline of Russian Cyberattacks on Ukraine
Released on 03/16/2022
Russia has been launching cyber attacks
against the Ukrainian government's private industry,
even critical infrastructure
that truly have no precedent in history.
These are some of the most disruptive cyber attacks
we've ever seen.
I'm Andy Greenberg.
I am a senior writer with Wired
and the author of the book, Sandworm,
and I am going to walk you through the history
of Russia's cyber attacks against Ukraine.
Right now, of course, there is an actual full-scale
Russian invasion of Ukraine taking place.
Ukraine is now the epicenter of Russia's conflict
with the west, as it has been in some ways
sort of under the radar for last almost decade.
But it also is a country whose recent history
has these lessons about the nature of cyber war.
And it's a country where we can look
to understand what Russia is capable of
in its digital disruption and how to be prepared for it.
2014, Russia hacks the Ukrainian
Central Election Commission.
In 2014, Ukraine has a revolution
and it pulls away from Russia's sphere of influence.
And then, later that year,
as it's having its first presidential election,
Russian state sponsored hackers break
into its Central Election Commission
and essentially try to fake the results.
They plant a spoofed image that seems to show
that this far right candidate has won by a landslide.
In fact, he won single digit percentages of the votes.
Now, actually, the Central Election Commission
caught this fake results in time and managed to foil this,
but Russian TV nonetheless broadcast those fake results
which kinda shows how they were working in league
with these hackers.
Putin and the Kremlin have always wanted
to paint the new Ukrainian democratic government
as controlled secretly by neo-Nazis
and so trying to spoof that the results showed
that the actual winner of the election
was this super far-right candidate was just another kind
of beat in that campaign of this information.
2015, Russia hacks Ukraine's power grid.
A now notorious group of state sponsored hackers,
called Sandworm, takes over Russia's cyber warfare
in Ukraine.
And they launch a whole series of attacks
that hits Ukrainian media government agencies.
And then, just before Christmas, they cap all this off
with a cyber attack on the Ukrainian power grid,
which is the first time in history
that hackers actually trigger a blackout.
But just to kind of add insults to injury,
Sandworm also destroyed hundreds of computers
inside of these utilities.
They bombarded them with fake phones calls,
just to add an extra layer of chaos,
and they even turned off the backup power supply
to the control rooms themselves
so that these operators were thrown into a kind
of blackout in the midst of their own blackout.
This blackout really only lasted six hours or so
before Ukrainians were able
to manually switch the power back on.
But I think it was intended to have a kind
of terrorizing effect and it shocked the world.
And it also kind of gave Sandworm this reputation as,
perhaps, the most disruptive,
the most cyber war-oriented hacker group in the world.
2016, Sandworm attacks Ukraine's power grid again,
this time in Kyiv.
About a year after Sandworm's first attacks in Ukraine,
it returns with another, even more severe collection
of cyber attacks against Ukrainian government agencies,
its Ministry of Defense and infrastructure and finance.
The hackers destroyed terabytes of data
on these agency networks.
They actually wiped the country's national budget
for the year.
This series of cyber attacks culminates in an attack
on the power grid, causing another blackout,
this time in the capital of Kyiv.
The second blackout only lasted an hour, but,
in some ways it was nonetheless kind of escalation
of what Sandworm had inflicted the year before.
They actually disabled safety systems
in this transmission station,
with the intention that, when the Ukrainian operators rushed
to turn the power back on,
they might have caused an overload of currents
on power lines, or even exploded a transformer.
Truly dangerous and physically destructive effects
of a kind that we had never seen before
inside of an electrical utility.
And that only failed because of a tiny misconfiguration
in Sandworm's malware.
2017, Sandworm releases the Notpetya Malware.
That morning of June 27, 2017,
Ukrainians across the country began
to see this ransomware message appear
on computers in all sorts of networks, from private industry
and banks to government agencies, hospitals.
It seemed to be encrypting computers and demanding a ransom
in the ways that cyber criminal hackers often do.
But even when you paid the ransom,
you couldn't recover your files.
It was actually a data destroying piece of code,
designed to cause maximum chaos.
And then, because internet worms do not generally stay
within national boundaries,
it spread to the rest of the world.
Notpetya immediately hit companies like Maersk,
the world's largest shipping firm, and FedEx and Mondelez,
which owns Cadbury and the Nabisco,
and Merck, the pharmaceutical giants.
In the case of Maersk, for instance, that meant
that tens of thousands of trucks were lining up outside
of terminals and ports around the world
and ships with thousands and thousands of containers
on them are arriving at those ports
and nobody knows what is on them.
For Merck, it meant they had to borrow their own HPV vaccine
from the Center for Disease Control
because their manufacturing was shut down.
In each of these cases, these companies lost hundreds
of millions of dollars, more than a billion in some cases,
all because of this one cyber attack
that had spilled out from Ukraine.
What comes next?
In the years after Notpetya, Sandworm hit other targets
around the world, including the 2018 Winter Olympics
in PyongChang, Korea to the nation of Georgia,
where they shut down television stations in 2019.
But we haven't seen Sandworm reappear
in any obvious way in Ukraine.
Now, just before the full-scale physical Russian invasion
of Ukraine that occurred on February 24th,
we did see another round of cyber attacks
that destroyed hundreds of computers
in Ukrainian government and military agencies,
although we don't have any conclusive evidence yet
that it really was Sandworm this time.
Now in the midst of this invasion,
cyber war has been a pretty secondary element at best.
People are dying by the thousands,
refugees are fleeing the country.
That is, of course, the context in which anything I say
about cyber war has to be framed.
It might even make a tax on computer systems
seem kind of trivial.
But I think that now that we understand Russia's
cyber warfare playbook, now that we see what Sandworm
is capable of, we have to kind of reckon
with those capabilities.
Russia is now in this conflict with the west as a whole.
It's been isolated and sanctions and we'll have
to grapple the fact that Russia can unleash these sorts
of cyber attacks on Western targets
if it feels like it's been put into a corner,
whether that's comes in the form of data-destroying malware
or attacks on power grids or even something
like Notpetya again.
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