Sandworm Quotes

“It’s clear where the world is going. We’re entering a world where every thermostat, every electrical heater, every air conditioner, every power plant, every medical device, every hospital, every traffic light, every automobile will be connected to the Internet. Think about what it will mean for the world when those devices are the subject of attack.” Then he made his pitch. “The world needs a new, digital Geneva Convention.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“If you want to play well, you can’t afford to hate your opponent.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“Distributed across the world, and in a far more concentrated sense for Ukraine itself, NotPetya was the “electronic Pearl Harbor” that John Hamre had first warned of in 1997.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“Americans ignored Ukraine’s escalating cyberwar in the face of repeated warnings that the attacks there would soon spread to the rest of the world. Then, very suddenly, exactly that scenario played out, at an immense cost.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“It’s clear where the world is going. We’re entering a world where every thermostat, every electrical heater, every air conditioner, every power plant, every medical device, every hospital, every traffic light, every automobile will be connected to the Internet. Think about what it will mean for the world when those devices are the subject of attack.” Then he made his pitch. “The world needs a new, digital Geneva Convention. It needs new rules of the road,” Smith said, intoning the words slowly for emphasis. “What we need is an approach that governments will adopt that says they will not attack civilians in times of peace, they will not attack hospitals, they will not attack the electrical grid, they will not attack the political processes of other countries.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“The inherent geography of this domain is that everything plays to the offense.” Nearly a decade later, Hayden’s cynical words still ring true—even if he was off by a few hundred miles. On the internet, we are all Ukraine. In a dimension of conflict without borders, we all live on the front line. And if we fail to heed the borderland’s warnings, we may all share its fate.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“But as the Olympics began, the North had seemed as if it were experimenting with a friendlier approach. The North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, had sent his sister as a diplomatic emissary to the games and had invited South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, to visit the North Korean capital of Pyongyang. The two countries had even taken the surprising step of combining their Olympic women’s hockey teams in a show of friendship. Why would North Korea launch a disruptive cyberattack in the midst of that charm offensive?”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“Even so, Oh still smoldered when he thought back to the night of the opening ceremony. “For me, the Olympics are about peace. It still makes me furious that without any clear purpose, someone hacked this event,” he told me months later. “If we hadn’t solved it, it would have been a huge black mark on these games of peace. I can only hope that the international community can figure out a way that this will never happen again.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“With those four sentences displayed on a page of the White House website, the U.S. government had finally, publicly acknowledged Russia’s cyberwar in Ukraine. That acknowledgment had come nearly three and a half years after the siege had begun and almost eight months after it exploded out to the rest of the world.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“It is simply good military practice. War is war. It sounds simple, but many Americans seem to believe that there should be a gentlemen’s code, that war should be fought by soldiers in remote battlefields. Americans believe that war should be sterile, because it has never hit their home soil since the Civil War of 130 years ago, and even then, only in the south-eastern part of the country. Russia has been rampaged for centuries by every would-be world conqueror. Millions of Russians have died on their homeland during wars. This is a feeling Americans do not know. The only way you get an enemy to submit is by bringing the war to its people.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“But by the beginning of 2018, they were adding up to something remarkable: A single agency within the Russian government was responsible for at least three of the most brazen hacking milestones in history, all in just the past three years. The GRU, it now seemed, had masterminded the first-ever hacker-induced blackouts, the plot to interfere in a U.S. presidential election, and the most destructive cyberweapon ever released. A larger question now began to loom in my mind: Who are the GRU?”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“Nakashima’s report didn’t merely suggest that the U.S. government strongly believed the Russian state was behind the attack. It also went on to name the exact organization NotPetya’s programmers worked for: the Main Center for Special Technology, or GTsST, a part of Russia’s military spy agency known as the Main Intelligence Directorate, or Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye, commonly referred to by its Russian acronym. The GRU.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“That seeming indifference, particularly on the part of the United States, was maddening. Was President Trump’s unwillingness to acknowledge the Russian hacking that had aided his campaign now extending to all Russian hacking, no matter how destructive? Or was his administration simply incompetent or misinformed? “They’ve never even named the actor,” Rob Lee told me in late 2017, marveling at the government’s continued nonresponse to Sandworm’s provocations. “NotPetya tested the red lines of the West, and the result of the test was that there are no red lines yet,” Johns Hopkins’s Thomas Rid said. “The lack of any proper response is almost an invitation to escalate more.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“In fact, the evidence of Russia’s responsibility was already clear enough for me. Anton Cherepanov at ESET had published his analysis of the meshed lines of forensic clues showing that Sandworm was very likely behind NotPetya. Reams of other public reporting showed that the same group was responsible for the escalating cyberwar in Ukraine, including its two blackouts, all signs pointing to the Kremlin’s culpability.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“Along with its unprecedented devastation, Sandworm’s NotPetya worm left in its wake six months of inexplicable silence. For the rest of the summer, the fall, and into the winter of 2017, no victim of NotPetya outside Ukraine would name Russia as the perpetrator of the attack. Nor did any government other than Ukraine’s speak out to name the Kremlin. Russia seemed to have launched a cyberwar weapon that had crossed countless borders, violated practically every norm of state-sponsored hacking imaginable, and yet earned not a single reproach from the West. Three”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“But the largest of those blind spots, perhaps, can be found in the West’s attitude to Ukraine and silence in the face of the cyberwar afflicting it. For a decade, the United States had treated Russian cyberattacks on its neighbors—Estonia, Georgia, and Ukraine, above all—as a “distant” problem. The Obama administration had watched since 2015 as Ukraine became a helpless victim and a nation-sized laboratory for Russia’s cruelest hacking techniques. It allowed those hackers to cross one red line after another, including not one but two unprecedented blackout attacks.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“Cyberattacks on nonmilitary, physical infrastructure, Lee believed, were a class of weapon that ought to be considered, along with cluster bombs and biological weapons, simply too dangerous and uncontrollable for any ethical nation to wield.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“When I spoke to former president Yushchenko on the phone later that year, he argued that Russia’s tactics, online and off, have one single aim: “to destabilize the situation in Ukraine, to make its government look incompetent and vulnerable.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“After the revolution’s final, tragic bloodletting, Yanukovich could see that the violence had only steeled the movement against him. He fled to Russia. Putin, not one to let geopolitics turn against him, took a different approach: He promptly invaded.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“Even the revelation that Sandworm was a fully equipped infrastructure-hacking team with ties to Russia and global attack ambitions never received the attention Hultquist thought it deserved.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“Sandworm’s hackers were stealthy, professional saboteurs. Fancy Bear, by contrast, seemed to be shameless, profane propagandists. And now, in the service of Vladimir Putin, they were tasked with helping Donald Trump to win the presidency.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“Think of every hospital in the U.S. that uses Nuance. Think about how many days it was down, multiplied by the number of lab results, transfers, discharges, and how many of those are time sensitive,” Corman said. “In some cases, time matters. Pain level is affected. Quality of life is affected. Mortality is affected.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“But not all of NotPetya’s costs could be measured in dollars. Another of its collateral victims was a little-known company called Nuance, focused on speech-recognition software. Nuance’s code was used in the first version of the iPhone’s Siri, for instance, and the voice command system in Ford cars. By 2017, however, much of Nuance’s business came from a vast array of institutions that relied on its technology in matters of life and death: hospitals.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“It felt like a bad end-of-the-world movie. You’re disoriented. You can’t understand what to do next. You feel like you’ve lost an arm and can’t function properly,” Bondarenko said. “Life went very fast from ‘What’s new on Facebook?’ to ‘Do I have enough money to buy food for tomorrow?”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“Russia will never accept Ukraine being a sovereign and independent country,” he told me. “Twenty-five years since the Soviet collapse, Russia is still sick with this imperialistic syndrome.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“Six days after the explosion, as nuclear fragments continued to rain down from Chernobyl’s toxic cloud, party officials evacuated their own children to safety on the Crimean peninsula, even as they instructed Ukraine’s citizens to carry on with their annual May Day parade. Just sixty miles south of Chernobyl’s ground zero, thousands of people—including countless children—marched down Kyiv’s main drag of Khreshchatyk Street. They carried flowers, flags, and portraits of Soviet leaders, unaware that those same leaders had knowingly exposed them to the fallout of one of the worst industrial disasters in history.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“The historian Anne Applebaum’s book on the Holodomor, Red Famine, documents stories of desperate peasants resorting to eating leather and rodents, grass, and, in states of starvation-induced mania, even their own children. All of this occurred in one of the most fertile grain-production regions in the world.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“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.” ■”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“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.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“One afternoon in February 2018, the Trump White House released an extremely short, straightforward statement: In June 2017, the Russian military launched the most destructive and costly cyber-attack in history. The attack, dubbed “NotPetya,” quickly spread worldwide, causing billions of dollars in damage across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. It was part of the Kremlin’s ongoing effort to destabilize Ukraine and demonstrates ever more”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers