Tag Archive for: RussiaUkraine

Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas Wars Reveal All [Cyber] Conflicts Are Global

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During an impassioned public plea in October, President Joe Biden linked the Gaza and Ukraine conflicts, saying each is “vital for America’s national security.” The subsequent funding bill also linked the two and quickly became political, with debates about the connection raging. 

However, while debates continue, cyberspace reflects the two conflicts being intimately linked to broader geopolitical alliances. It also serves as proof of the blurring lines between traditional hacktivism as an ideologically motivated activity and organized nation-state actor attacks. 

Cyber War’s Reach

The wide-reaching effects of cyber war mean that even civilians of countries not directly involved in a war might be impacted.

For instance, in 2020, Israel faced a significant cyber threat targeting critical water infrastructure. For the US, this threat became a reality in 2023. The Iranian CyberAv3ngers group exploited vulnerabilities in US industrial control systems, revealing significant cybersecurity weaknesses in American water utilities.

The nature of modern cyber warfare adds a global aspect to nearly every conflict. Nations must tackle the issue with universally coordinated and revamped tactics able to combat sophisticated nation-states in a truly global digital battlefield.

The Blurring of Lines

The trend of cybercriminals declaring allegiances to nation-states and actively participating in geopolitical conflicts comes as the distinction between hacktivists, cybercriminals, and nation-state actors continues to erode.

Hacktivist groups, such as SiegedSec, have been acting against the West by declaring allegiances to Russia and targeting Israel’s government infrastructure and Shufersal, the country’s largest supermarket chain.

The increasingly complex web of alliances and motives in the cyber realm means that nation-state actors, traditionally associated with espionage, are now engaging in economic crimes. North Korean state actors are this trend’s epitome, being responsible for a quarter of all global cryptocurrency currency thefts.

Meanwhile, Chinese state actors have gone to unprecedented lengths to conduct economic espionage and intellectual property theft. These actors routinely…

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Pentagon’s Unclassified Cyber Strategy is Influenced by Russia-Ukraine War, China

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The newly unclassified strategy anticipates election security issues and suggests an independent cyber service.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy Mieke Eoyang talks to members of the press in Washington, D.C., Sept. 12, 2023. Photo credit: Senior Airman Cesar Navarro / DVIDS

The Defense Department’s unclassified summary of its 2023 cyber strategy presents a broad-ranging plan informed by the lessons learned from the Russia-Ukraine war, as well as the growing tensions between the U.S. and China in cyberspace.

“There are some shifts that reflect our real-world experience for the department in the time period between 2018 and 2023 to include our experiences of observing the conflict in Russia-Ukraine that have shaped and refined our understanding of the role of cyber in warfare, the ways in which we defend the homeland, and, of course, the importance of working on strengthening the cybersecurity of our partners and allies,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy Mieke Eoyang told reporters at a roundtable organized by George Washington University.

The Pentagon’s unclassified cyber strategy comes on the heels of the White House’s national cybersecurity strategy implementation plan providing federal agencies with actionable steps to improve the nation’s security posture. While it is unclear whether a similar implementation plan will follow the Pentagon’s new cyber strategy, Eoyang said there are “mechanisms in the Department of Defense that we use to make sure that we are moving forward with that.” 

Some lessons learned from the Russia-Ukraine war include the importance of cloud migration, the impacts of satellite communications disruption, as well as people’s ability to tell their story to the world during an armed conflict. 

“The ability of Ukrainians to move their data extraterritorially, but still maintain access to it was really important,” Eoyang said. “We saw the Russian attempts to disrupt satellite communications as something that, I think, many people are still trying to understand that aggregate effect of that on the conflict. But certainly, it is something that we are looking at very carefully.”

Securing the 2024 Presidential…

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Will Russia’s struggle in Ukraine help Taiwan — or hurt it? | Russia-Ukraine war

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In the lead-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Beijing and Moscow doubled down on their close relationship.

While Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin have a long history of working together, they publicly cemented their ties with a “no-limits” partnership just weeks before the war began.

The timing of the meeting and the subsequent invasion, after the Beijing Winter Olympics had concluded, led many observers to wonder whether Xi knew the war was coming. They also wondered, as Russian troops rolled into Ukraine, whether Taiwan was next.

Superficially at least, Ukraine and Taiwan appear to have much in common. Both are democracies whose territories have historically been claimed by much larger and better-armed neighbours. Beijing has long pledged to “reunify” with Taiwan by force or by peace by 2049, the year the Chinese Communist Party has set for the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, 100 years after their victory in the country’s Civil War.

Tensions across the Taiwan Strait rose further last August as Nancy Pelosi, then the United States House of Representatives speaker, became the highest-ranking US official to visit Taipei in 25 years. China responded with a series of war exercises around Taiwan and ramped up its rhetoric. In 2022, Beijing sent a record 1,737 flights into Taiwan’s Air Defence Identification Zone, which includes the airspace around Taiwan and the coast of China, according to data compiled by Gerald C Brown and Ben Lewis, independent defence analysts who track such incursions. This was more than the combined numbers for the previous four years.

Now, on the eve of the anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s struggles to make advances in the war have once again given rise to questions about what lessons China may have learned from its close ally. Will China conclude that it might be better to attack Taiwan before it is better prepared to defend itself? Or has Putin’s war shown the perils of rushing into such a conflict?

The short answer: Predicting China’s behaviour is a challenge because its decision-making is opaque to much of the outside world. Instead, China…

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The Russia-Ukraine war is causing some to rethink the role of offensive cyber operations in armed conflict

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The impact of Russia’s offensive cyber operations against Ukraine appears to be muted. (Image credit: Juanmonino via Getty)

For some, the horror of the Russian invasion of Ukraine was also meant to mark the dawn of a new era in modern warfare: one in which degrading your enemy’s capabilities through cyberspace would play an important — perhaps even decisive — role in determining success on the real-world battlefield.

As militaries and societies grew ever more connected to and reliant on the internet to run, so too would the cyberspace domain grow in importance in combat, and nowhere was that supposed to be demonstrated more clearly than in Russia’s war, where their elite and well-resourced military hacking units could cut off Ukraine’s access to power, water and other essential resources, disrupt their communications, wipe out large swaths of private and public sector systems and data, and smooth the way for ground troops to dominate their Ukrainian counterparts.

In reality, the impact of offensive cyber operations appears to have been far more muted.

While the initial invasion did, in fact, come with a flurry of hacking campaigns against many of these targets as Russian troops crossed the border, the cadence of those campaigns have dropped markedly in the months following and have seemingly failed to provide Moscow with any meaningful advantage on the ground.

The experience has some U.S. observers advising that we collectively pump the breaks on the idea — formally endorsed by the U.S. military and others governments — that cyberspace is now a fully fledged domain of war, comparable to land, air, sea and space. That’s one of the chief conclusions reached by Jon Bateman, a former cyber specialist at the Pentagon who has served as an advisor to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense on military and cyber strategy, in a paper released shortly before the new year.

“I think it’s fair for U.S. military and NATO and others to define cyber as an operational domain. That can be a helpful doctrinal concept. I think where it becomes misleading is when military and civilian leaders then assume that cyberspace is as consequential or major as…

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