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.

Use the first moments in study. You may miss many an opportunity for quick victory this way, but the moments of study are insurance of success. Take your time and be sure.

industrial control systems, or ICS—also known in some cases as supervisory control and data acquisition, or SCADA, systems. That software doesn’t just push bits around, but instead sends commands to and takes in feedback from industrial equipment, a point where the digital and physical worlds meet.

The link between Sandworm and a Cimplicity file that phoned home to a server in Sweden was enough for Wilhoit to come to a startling conclusion: Sandworm wasn’t merely focused on espionage. Intelligence-gathering operations don’t break into industrial control systems. Sandworm seemed to be going further, trying to reach into victims’ systems that could potentially hijack physical machinery, with physical consequences.

“They’re possibly trying to bridge the gap between digital and kinetic.” The hackers’ goals seemed to extend beyond spying to industrial sabotage.

Russia, it seemed to Hultquist, was trying out basic methods of pairing traditional physical attacks with digital weapons of mass disruption.

Lee was, at the time, offended by the mere notion of malware capable of attacking physical infrastructure. “Here some asshole had targeted control systems,” he remembers thinking. “The path to making the world a better place was control systems. Someone was jeopardizing that, and it pissed me off.”

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.