The ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine has shed a light on the importance of understanding cyber warfare and its role in active kinetic warfare. As the first instance of a world-class cyber power being engaged in a kinetic war, it has become clear that cyber plays a significant role in warfare, including espionage, sabotage, propaganda, and disruptions caused by distributed denial-of-service attacks.
According to experts, cyber warfare consists of two parts information warfare using cyber tactics and techniques and one part cyber warfare with actual destruction. Cyberattacks with strategic or military implications can manipulate software, data, knowledge, and opinion to degrade performance and produce political or psychological effects, introducing uncertainty into the minds of opposing commanders or political leaders. Manipulating public opinion to damage an opponent’s legitimacy and authority is also valuable.
The effectiveness of cyber warfare attacks is judged across five areas: creating chaos, collecting intelligence, driving narratives to shape opinions (disinformation), inflicting damage to data or ecosystems, and stealing/exfiltrating victim data for extortion and/or sale to criminal data brokers.
Russia has been cited as an “aggressor” in its conflict with Ukraine, but it is important to remember that cyber knows no boundaries, and any country or hacktivist group can join the battle with impunity. It is one of the ways cyber is fundamentally different from traditional warfare, and a dynamic that both sides have benefited from and been victimized by.
Russia holds a broad definitional concept of information warfare, which includes intelligence, counterintelligence, deceit, disinformation, electronic warfare, debilitation of communications, degradation of navigation support, psychological pressure, degradation of information systems, and propaganda. Cyber power is a key facet of hybrid warfare and is an important enabler in the Russian political strategy.
Russian cyberattacks against computers in Kyiv, Poland, the European Parliament, and the European Commission prior to rolling tanks across the Ukraine border have played a key role in the conflict. Examples of cyber warfare tactics used in the Russia-Ukraine conflict include targeting a US satellite communications company that provided support to the Ukrainian military with malware designed to erase its data before disabling it. A cyberattack against the City Council of Odessa was timed to coincide with a cruise missile attack that was meant to disrupt Ukraine’s response to Russian forces attacking in the south. Cyberattacks have also been launched against many parts of Ukraine’s infrastructure and government and civilian networks, including hospitals.
Lessons learned from the ongoing conflict include the difficulty of containing the effects of cyberattacks when not coupled with kinetic military activity. Attribution of cyberattacks is difficult, and cyber warfare sits in a gray zone, as it can be used by state and non-state actors, with fewer inhibitions than kinetic strikes. With the use of non-state or patriotic proxies, cyberattacks are less manpower-intensive than kinetic attacks but require more skills to prepare and execute and can be just as devastating to the victim’s infrastructure.
There is no question that cyber power is being wielded as a strategic weapon alongside the use of kinetic force in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Cyber warfare allows power and force to be democratized and sold on the Dark Web, available to anyone with technical skills, irrespective of borders, authorities, or affiliations. It is vital to start thinking ahead of the threat and develop strategies to respond to these challenges at scale.