Cyberspace: Russia’s offensive in the grey zone of Ukraine's war

 

In this article, Salomé Rosa argues that the recent war being waged in Ukraine has actually been conducted for the last ten years in the world's new warfighting domain: cyberspace. Through information confrontation, Russia has been exploiting offensive cyber operations in the grey zone between war and peace, taking advantage of Ukraine as its hacking playground.

In the current multipolar context of rapid change arises a need to rethink strategic scenarios adapted to a much more interconnected world. Alongside the recognition of the costs that conventional warfare implies for both stakeholders, cyberspace emerges as a unique stage where domestic and international implications are totally independent, in which the States operate in a borderless domain that challenges the very idea of sovereignty.

Cyber operations are a new way of exercising foreign policy at the service of all four instruments of national power: diplomatic, informational, economic, and military. In practice, cyberspace can be used for physical attacks on infrastructure, espionage, and electronic warfare (EW), as well as for psychological operations, such as cognitive attacks that result in disinformation, operating in parallel with the recent phenomenon of Internet Fragmentation. 

Among the major cyber superpowers, Russia stands out for its arsenal of cyber tools and hackers capable of carrying out potentially disruptive attacks, producing strategic effects that work both as a political lever and a military tool. In this sense, its cyber strategy is dictated by its confrontation with the West, based on a conspiratorial vision of a world that aims to spread information in order to change the tissue of Russian society. In particular, for this reason, the 2016 Information Security Doctrine advocates a greater role for Russia's own internet management and greater domestic information and technology production, with cyber governance being centralized, hierarchical, and under the personal control of President Vladimir Putin. The main elements of this policy on resilience include the RuNet and SORM surveillance regime.

Within this view, in the last ten years, Russia has sought to achieve superiority over opponents by executing cyber operations such as conducting disinformation, propaganda, espionage, and destructive cyberattacks as an offset to conventional warfare. Evidence of this approach can be seen in Russian intelligence operations against Estonia (2007), Georgia (2008), and Ukraine (2013-22). The war currently raging in Ukraine is a physical manifestation of Russia's interest in annexing the region and denying the country any proximity to the West. However, it concerns a conflict that has been going on in another field at least since the end of 2013, when a mobile blackout and the shutdown of websites occurred over Euromaidan. A year later, in December 2015, Ukraine's electricity grid was interrupted by a cyber-attack called BlackEnergy, which caused a short-term blackout (two to six hours) for 80,000 customers of a utility company in western Ukraine. In the same line, a similar incident took place in 2016, when another power grid was taken offline. Through a sequence of steps that ended with the installation of a malware, the energy was briefly cut to one-fifth of the residents in Kyiv, simultaneously affecting the road systems.

On 27 June 2017 followed what is considered the most expensive cyber-attack in history and which, according to experts, was targeted to Ukrainian infrastructures. On the eve of Ukraine's Constitution Day, a group of Russian military hackers identified by US, UK, and EU authorities launched the NotPetya ransomware, a destructive software that was hidden in the Ukrainian financial system, erasing data from the computers of banks, energy companies, senior government officials and airports. Although the main target of the attack was Ukraine, the software eventually spread across the globe, destroying the computer systems of thousands of companies and causing approximately $10bn (£7.5bn) of damage.

To end this line of Russian attacks on Ukraine in cyberspace, it is worth noting that recently, after the Russian invasion began in February, a cyber-attack struck Ukraine's largest fixed-line telecommunications company, Ukrtelecom, crashing the company's services across the country. In this way, while experts had been expecting a more charged Russian offensive within the information technological warfare, forecasts of a conventional war waged by Russia against Ukraine inevitably being backed by highly destructive cyber operations have so far proved to be unfounded.

So far, Russia's attempts to undermine Ukrainian sovereignty via information confrontation have mainly focused on galvanizing its domestic population through the control of the national internet, made possible by the above-mentioned phenomenon of Internet Fragmentation. In this sense, Russian propaganda has been illustrating the war in Ukraine as based on reunification and liberation, for the sake of appeasing public opinion towards the conflict. 

That being said, it is therefore certain that in the last decade Ukraine has been facing probably the greatest cyber aggression than any other country across the globe, having failed to notice the signs of a possible Russian physical offensive. Although there is no such thing as a cyberwar, one must denote that there is a cyber dimension of a real war, and the one in Ukraine's war began ten years ago.

Source of the image: Sky News

Salomé Rosa, nº227712, Laboratório II (Análise de Política Externa)