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February 1 - February 5, 2023
Kremlin-backed hackers that seemed to be launching these unprecedented weapons of mass disruption: a group known as Sandworm.
NotPetya, now considered the most devastating and costly malware in history.
A zero day, in hacker jargon, is a secret security flaw in software, one that the company who created and maintains the software’s code doesn’t know about.
“zero days” to respond and push out a patch to protect users.
Dmytro Oleksiuk, also known by his handle, Cr4sh. Around 2007, Oleksiuk had sold BlackEnergy on Russian-language hacker forums, priced at around $40,
Infect a victim machine with BlackEnergy, and it became a member of a so-called botnet, a collection of hijacked computers, or bots.
Arrakis is the desert planet where the novel Dune, the 1965 epic by Frank Herbert, takes place.
2009. Until Robinson had managed to piece together the bread crumbs of their operations, they’d been penetrating organizations in secret for half a decade.
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.
common piece of ICS software sold by General Electric is Cimplicity,
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.
KillDisk, a data-destroying tool that had been circulating among hackers for about a decade.*
penetrating one of the staff’s PCs via an infected attachment: It was again a form of BlackEnergy,
“Ukraina,” comes from a Slavic word for “borderland.”*
Over the last millennium, the country’s hopes for self-rule rose and fell three times: in the seventeenth-century rebellion of the Ukrainian Cossacks,
in the bloody Ukrainian civil war following Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution in 1917;
tragically misguided alliance with Nazi occupiers dur...
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The Soviet regime manufactured a famine in Ukraine that would kill 3.9 million people, a tragedy of unimaginable scope that’s known today as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for “hunger” and “extermination.”
By 1932, starvation had become a far more purposeful Soviet tool of control.
three warring sides: those supporting the Nazis in an ill-fated hope of a life better than the one under Stalin, those conscripted into the Soviet forces, and a small faction fighting in vain for an independent Ukraine.
In all, 1 in 6 Ukrainians died in the war, and about 1 in 8 Russians, with a staggering total of 26.6 million deaths across the U.S.S.R., a number unparalleled in the history of war.
In the 1950s, through the last years of Stalin’s terror and the rise of Khrushchev to take his place, more Ukrainians were sent to the U.S.S.R.’s gulags than any other nationality.
Leonid Kuchma, became known for siphoning a stream of boondoggle deals and cheap loans to cronies.
chosen successor, Viktor Yanukovich, an oligarch with close ties to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, ran for president in 2004. His opponent was Viktor Yushchenko, a Ukrainian nationalist, financier, and reformer who promised to finally bring the country out from under Russia’s thumb.
a month before elections, Yushchenko was mysteriously poisoned with dioxin, falling deathly ill. He barely survived, his skin left scarred and disfigured by the attack. Later, two Russians were arrested in a failed attempt to blow up Yushchenko’s campaign headquarters in Kyiv.
Putin had gone so far as to send Yanukovich his congratulations before the results were even tallied.
Ukrainians had had enough. Hundreds of thousands of people flooded the streets of Kyiv, filling the Maidan and waving orange scarves, the chosen color of Yushchenko’s campaign. Facing a mass uprising, Yanukovich stepped down a month later.
The final straw, however, wasn’t Yanukovich’s corruption but his Russian alliances. Under Yushchenko, Ukraine had started on a long road to membership in NATO, a prospect that no doubt infuriated and terrified Putin. Ukrainians’ European hopes had still lingered under Yanukovich in the form of an association agreement with the European Union, trade negotiations that represented the first baby step toward the West. But a week before signing the agreement, under pressure from Putin, Yanukovich killed the deal. The uprising and crackdown that followed had little of the bloodless idealism of the
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The death toll was 103 protesters, a group now immortalized as the “Heavenly Hundred”—the
(The CyberBerkut hackers would be revealed years later to be linked with the Russian hacker group Fancy Bear that meddled in U.S. elections, too.)
Instead, he hoped to create a “frozen conflict”: By taking enough Ukrainian territory to lock it into a permanent war, Russia sought to prevent the country from being welcomed into the European Union or NATO, instead pinning it in place as a strategic buffer between Moscow and the West.
Russia’s attacks on Ukraine, whether they’re carried out with destructive malware or Buk missiles, shouldn’t be seen as Ukraine’s problem alone. Russia’s aggression against its neighbor reveals a dark playbook, he insisted, one that would sooner or later spread to the rest of the globe.
“The question is not for whom the bell tolls,” Yushchenko warned. “The bell tolls for us all. This is a threat to every country in the world.”
the first-known case of an actual hacker-induced blackout.
It began with a phishing email impersonating a message from the Ukrainian parliament. A malicious Word attachment had silently run a script known as a macro, a little program hidden inside the document, on the victims’ machines.
the same group that had just snuffed out the lights for nearly a quarter of a million Ukrainians had only a year before infected the computers of American electric utilities with the very same malware.
military magazine Signal titled “The Failing of Air Force Cyber.”
And before their eyes, phantom hands had clicked through dozens of breakers—each serving power to a different swath of the region—and one by one by one, turned them cold.
Moscow-based internet service provider, Cityline.
He considered the attack a mere “cyber riot,” the internet extension of the improvised chaos playing out on Tallinn’s streets.
The attackers’ goals shifted, evolving from mere denial-of-service attacks to defacements, replacing the content of websites with swastikas and pictures of the country’s prime minister with a Hitler mustache, all in a coordinated effort to paint Estonians as anti-Russian fascists.
Still, NATO never treated the Estonian cyberattacks as an overt act of aggression by the Russian state against one of NATO’s own. Under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty that lays out NATO’s rules, an attack against any NATO member is meant to be considered an attack against all of them, with a collective response in kind.
Proclaiming that it was protecting Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgian oppression, Russia flooded the small country with more than twenty-five thousand troops, twelve hundred artillery vehicles, two hundred planes, and forty helicopters.
August 11 was the most chaotic of her life. To start, her building’s internet was inexplicably down, making her job of combating Russian military propaganda—including false claims that Georgians had been massacring civilians in South Ossetia and Abkhazia—nearly impossible.
Russia hadn’t sought to conquer or occupy its smaller neighbor, but instead to lock it into a “frozen conflict,” a permanent state of low-level war on its own soil. The dream of many Georgians, like Mshvidobadze, that their country would become part of NATO, and thus protected from Russian aggression, had been put on indefinite hold.
Together with the NSA’s elite offensive hacking team, then known as Tailored Access Operations, or TAO, and the Israeli cybersecurity team known as Unit 8200, the Pentagon’s Strategic Command began developing a piece of malware unlike any before. It would be capable of not simply disrupting critical equipment in Natanz but destroying it.
He green-lighted a plan to deploy that brilliant, malicious piece of software, an operation code-named Olympic Games.
Nuclear power requires uranium that’s about 3 to 5 percent uranium-235, but nuclear weapons require a core of uranium that’s as much as 95 percent composed of that rarer isotope.
To enrich uranium into bomb-worthy material, it has to be turned into a gas and pumped into a centrifuge’s long, aluminum cylinder.
the walls of that spinning chamber reaches as much as a million times the force of gravity, separating out the heavier uranium-238 so that the uranium-235 can be siphoned off.
