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

by Andy Greenberg

This is what cyberwar looks like: an invisible force capable of striking out from an unknown origin to sabotage, on a massive scale, the technologies that underpin civilization.

A small group of researchers would begin to sound the alarm—largely in vain—that Russia was turning Ukraine into a test lab for cyberwar innovations. They cautioned that those advancements might soon be deployed against the United States, NATO, and a larger world that remained blithely unprepared for this new dimension of war. And they pointed to a single force of Kremlin-backed hackers that seemed to be launching these unprecedented weapons of mass disruption: a group known as Sandworm.

NotPetya,

The nation’s name itself, “Ukraina,” comes from a Slavic word for “borderland.”

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

There has never been a time like this in which we have the power to create knowledge and the power to create havoc, and both those powers rest in the same hands. We live in an age when one person sitting at one computer can come up with an idea, travel through cyberspace, and take humanity to new heights. Yet, someone can sit at the same computer, hack into a computer system and potentially paralyze a company, a city, or a government.

The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.

Sandworm was not some aberrant or rogue element in the Russian armed forces. It was a direct expression of the strategy of its most senior leaders. ■

“There was no military, long-term objective. It was about a psychological objective, taking that war out of the eastern front and bringing it right to Kiev.” Just as election hacking is meant to rattle the foundations of citizens’ trust that their democracy is functioning, infrastructure hacking is meant to shake their faith in the fundamental security of their society, Hultquist told me, echoing the unified sense of information warfare Gerasimov’s paper had described five years earlier. “The foundation for government is the ability to protect their people,”

Putin has little hope of outgunning the West as the center of global power in a symmetric face-off. Russia’s economy is smaller than Italy’s or Canada’s. And even with its outsized spending on war relative to that economy, its military budget is just over a tenth the size of America’s. Yet Russia sets off its IEDs—NotPetya, interference in the U.S. election, the attack on the Olympics—as cheap, asymmetrical tactics to destabilize a world order that’s long ago turned against it. “This is Russia: embattled, short on resources, reaching out and touching people,”

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