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.

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.

The key to that resilience, Geer had argued in his paper, is a sort of independence. “Because the wellspring of risk is dependence, aggregate risk is a monotonically increasing function of aggregate dependence,” Geer had written. Put more simply, a complex system like a digitized civilization is subject to cascading failures, where one thing depends on another, which depends on another thing. If the foundation fails, the whole tower tumbles.