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

by Andy Greenberg

Every country’s intelligence agencies that witness another country’s hacking capabilities, he explained, immediately seek to match or overtake their foes.

The powers of disruption Sandworm so recklessly displayed, in other words, weren’t an aberration. They’re merely the most visible model of a tool kit that every militarized nation and rogue state in the world might soon covet or possess: the new standard arsenal for a global cyberwar standoff.

Geer argued that the problem of potential cascading failures in computer systems might by some measures be more threatening to human life as we know it than even climate change. “Interdependence within society today is centered on the Internet beyond all other dependencies excepting climate, and the Internet has a time constant of change five orders of magnitude smaller than that of climate,” he wrote. Or, as he translated to me on the phone, dependence on a stable climate poses at least as much of an existential risk for humanity as dependence on stable computer networks. But a malicious actor doing his or her best to change the climate would need decades of pumping out carbon to do serious damage, while a malicious team of hackers could unleash chaos on the internet in a matter of minutes.

“On the Internet, we are all Poland. We all get invaded on the Web. The inherent geography of this domain is that everything plays to the offense.”