Ukraine Is Under Cyberattack

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Tuesday, June 27, 2017
One week ago today, I shared Andy Greenberg's piece at Wired about how Ukraine had become Russia's test lab for Cyberwar. In Ukraine, Greenberg wrote, "the quintessential cyberwar scenario has come to life."

There had been two blackouts already, and they weren't isolated attacks, but "part of a digital blitzkrieg that has pummeled Ukraine for the past three years—a sustained cyber­assault unlike any the world has ever seen. A hacker army has systematically undermined practically every sector of Ukraine: media, finance, transportation, military, politics, energy. Wave after wave of intrusions have deleted data, destroyed computers, and in some cases paralyzed organizations' most basic functions."

Today, Ukraine is being hit with another huge wave of cyberattacks.


Via Andrea Chalupa, RFE/RL reports: "Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Pavlo Rozenko said on Facebook on June 27 that every computer monitor in the cabinet of ministers was locked and displayed a message in English warning users that if they shut down their computers all of their data will be deleted."

There is no confirmation that Russia is behind today's cyberattack on Ukraine, but it would be extraordinary if that were not the case.

Meanwhile, as I have previously noted, Russian diplomats, presumed to be Russian intelligence agents, have been "waging a quiet effort to map the United States' telecommunications infrastructure, perhaps preparing for an opportunity to disrupt it," and Russia has developed "a cyberweapon that has the potential to be the most disruptive yet against electric systems that Americans depend on for daily life."

Trump is not taking these threats seriously, even as Ukraine is suffering the very cyberattacks that we should fear. To the absolute contrary, Trump seems keen to abet Russia's plotting against the U.S., by handing back to the Russians control of the compounds from which they are thought to have orchestrated the infrastructure mapping intel operations.

I don't know whether Trump is actively colluding with the Kremlin against the United States, or whether the combination of his enamourment of Putin and his own uninformed arrogance has led him to genuinely and unaccountably believe that the Russians are his pals. Either way, he clearly believes that Putin respects him, which is foolish in the extreme.

Putin is not Trump's ally. Trump is Putin's mark.

And what is happening in Ukraine today is a foreshadow of what is to come in the United States, because we have a president who doesn't believe it will ever happen here.
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