This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

by Nicole Perlroth

At 3:30 P.M., December 23, in the Ivano-Frankivsk region of western Ukraine, residents were just starting to pack up their desks and head home for the holidays when an engineer inside Prykarpattyaoblenergo’s control center noticed his cursor gliding across his computer screen, as if pushed by an invisible hand. The cursor moved to the dashboard that controlled Prykarpattyaoblenergo’s circuit breakers at substations around the region. One by one, the cursor double-clicked on the box to open the breakers and take the substations offline. The engineer watched in horror as a pop-up window suddenly appeared, confirming one last time that he wanted to cut heat and power to thousands of his countrymen. He desperately tried to regain command of his mouse, but it was no use. Whoever was inside his machine had left him powerless, and now was logging him out. He tried to log back in, but the hidden hand had already changed his password, kicking him out permanently. Now he could only watch as a digital ghost moved from one breaker to another, meticulously shutting down thirty substations altogether. Meanwhile, two other Ukraine power suppliers were struck in the same way, leaving a total of 230,000 Ukrainians in the dark. Once the power was cut, the hidden hand shut down Ukraine’s emergency phone lines too, just to add to the chaos. And finally, the coup de grace: The attackers shut off the backup power to the power distribution centers, forcing Ukrainians to try to put the pieces bac...