The parallel cyber war between Russia and Ukraine

Weeks before Russia’s military attacks escalated to their current intensity and force of destruction on the ground, Ukraine was already a target of cyberspace action. A new type of conflict is already a reality: hybrid warfare.

In addition to tanks and missiles, hackers are now an integral part of offensives aimed at dismantling a country’s infrastructure and generating psychological shocks to the population.

On Sunday (27/02), the charge d’affaires of Ukraine in Brazil, Anatoliy Tkach, said that the official website of the embassy (which is under the Ukrainian government’s internet structure) and the employees’ email were out of operation due to “Massive Cyber ​​Attacks”.

Tkach said the embassy is responding to contacts through its social media pages.

Two weeks ago, the Ukrainian government reported that four major websites — two linked to the military and two belonging to the country’s banking system — suffered an attack known as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. .

In this type of action, hackers artificially generate an access load far above the page’s capacity so that it is unavailable to users.

At least one of the attacks, the BBC revealed, was linked to amateur hackers who identified themselves as “Russian patriots”.

This community of hackers, initially unrelated to the Putin government, also sent 20 messages to Ukrainian schools with bomb threats.

Another onslaught was the mass sending of SMS messages to the Ukrainian population’s cell phones saying that all ATMs in the country were inoperative for withdrawals – false information.

The Russian government in a statement denied any involvement in these actions and said it has never conducted and does not conduct any “malicious” operations in cyberspace.

Russia invests in this field

For Luca Belli, professor at FGV Direito Rio and coordinator of the Center for Technology and Society at FGV, “these are the latest in a long series of attacks [cibernéticos] Russians in Ukraine”.

“It is important to note that since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Russians have been developing cutting-edge cyber-attack and cyber-defense capabilities. In other words, over this time they have been testing, experimenting and even implementing these technologies on a broad scale.”

Belli recalls the effects of 2017’s NotPetya, considered the biggest cyberattack in history and which also involves Russia (the hackers were linked to the government’s intelligence sector) and Ukraine (the national energy company and the country’s main airport were affected, to highlight some of the disorders).

“80% of Ukraine was paralyzed by NotPetya. To give a concrete example: the radiation monitoring system in Chernobyl was disabled for several hours. Imagine the psychological component of this type of attack, which leaves the target completely lost”, he says. the professor at FGV.

Another strategy over the years has been to patiently build into Ukraine’s infrastructure multiple backdoors — access points or gateways to exploit vulnerabilities and allow hackers to take over.

In recent days, Belli points out, a common type of attack in the Russia-Ukraine conflict has been using data wiper software.

“It’s malicious software that infects and erases databases. Imagine the chaos that could ensue if the military’s internet infrastructure loses all of its files.”

“This is a hybrid war, a war that combines classic war tactics —invasion with troops and tanks— with cybernetic strategies”, says the FGV professor.

Countries with little technological infrastructure or that do not efficiently develop online defense schemes will be more vulnerable in this new scenario.

Psychological effect of cyber warfare

The military idea of ​​bewildering the adversary has been serving as a basis for hacking offensives in this war. Bringing down the cellular and internet network aims to create panic by preventing the population of a country under attack from communicating.

“The goal is to create confusion, to make people feel lost. Shooting mass disinformation is part of a psychological warfare, to minimize the chances of the Ukrainians having a reaction”, says Luca Belli.

“That’s what happened in the last few days. It was reported that the Ukrainian president had fled the country and then he posted videos showing that this was not true. Imagine the effect of spreading that the president himself has already left the country. The psychological effect is devastating. in people.”