Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

by Andy Greenberg

Had physical destruction via code become an acceptable rule of the global game? Even the former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden seemed shaken by the new precedent. “Somebody crossed the Rubicon,” Hayden said in an interview with The New York Times. The attack that the West’s prophets of cyberwar had always feared, one capable of shutting down or destroying physical equipment from anywhere in the world, had come to pass. And Americans had been the first to do it. “No matter what you think of the effects—and I think destroying a cascade of Iranian centrifuges is an unalloyed good—you can’t help but describe it as an attack on critical infrastructure,” Hayden concluded.

The new incarnation of Russia’s hundred-year-old military intelligence agency had “shown the rest of the world how Russia expects to fight its future wars: with a mix of stealth, deniability, subversion, and surgical violence,” Galeotti wrote in July of that year. “The GRU is back in the global spook game and with a new playbook that will be a challenge for the West for years to come.”