“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,”
