The New Handbook For Cyberwar Is Being Written By Russia

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“It’s not that the Russians are doing something others can’t do,” a US intelligence officer said. “It’s that Russian hackers are willing to go there, to experiment and carry out attacks that others countries would back away from.”

Source: BuzzFeed News

SAN FRANCISCO — It was just before midnight on Dec. 17, 2016, when most of the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, went dark.

A transmission station, a type of power station that transmits high voltage electricity across large areas, had gone down. Vsevolod Kovalchuk, the head of Ukrainian state power grid operator Ukrenergo, explained on his Facebook page that the station had come under an “external attack” lasting roughly 30 minutes.

It was, cybersecurity experts said, the most recent maneuver in Russia’s increasingly aggressive and overt efforts to push the boundaries of modern-day warfare using everything from old-fashioned kompromat, the Russian term for publishing (real or fake) compromising material designed to smear opponents, to malware that blacks out cities.

“The Russians use cyberweapons like they butter bread in the morning. It’s a critical, fundamental component of their global hybrid warfare strategy. They are pushing the envelope on how they use it every day,” said Malcolm Nance, a former counterterrorism and intelligence officer for the US military, intelligence agencies, and the Department of Homeland Security. “Ukraine is just one of many test beds.”

If the world is currently entering a new era of cyberwarfare, Russian hackers are the pirates of those yet-uncharted seas. Nearly every week brings a new cyberattack, as Russia tests the vulnerabilities of countries around the world. From hacking into the emails of senior members of the Democratic Party to defacing the websites of Eastern European political candidates, Russia is being named as the perpetrator of the most audacious cyberattacks in recent years. In some cases, those attacks are acts of espionage, looking to sweep up as much intelligence as possible. In others, Russia is toying with psychological operations, teasing out their geopolitical goals. Just this week, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that a 2014 breach of Yahoo, which exposed more than 500 million email accounts, had actually been the work of Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) agents working with cybercriminals — one of the largest email breaches in history, targeting, the DOJ said, the email accounts of a small group of journalists, dissidents, and US government officials.

Read more: https://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/the-new-handbook-for-cyberwar-is-being-written-by-russia?utm_term=.upJQddOmg#.tjv0qqAew