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September 9, 2019 06:37 pm PDT

Notpetya: the incredible story of an escaped US cyberweapon, Russian state hackers, and Ukraine's cyberwar

Andy Greenberg (previously) is Wired's senior security reporter; he did amazing work covering Russian cyberwarfare in Ukraine, which he has expanded into a forthcoming book: Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers (I read it for a blurb and a review; it's excellent).

Last month while I was offline, Wired ran a long excerpt from the book, and it's a great introduction to the tenor of the work (which, again, I can't recommend highly enough -- it's a superb introduction to the equities, technicalities, personalities and ethics of cyberwarfare, that most problematic of metaphors).

For the past four and a half years, Ukraine has been locked in a grinding, undeclared war with Russia that has killed more than 10,000 Ukrainians and displaced millions more. The conflict has also seen Ukraine become a scorched-earth testing ground for Russian cyberwar tactics. In 2015 and 2016, while the Kremlin-linked hackers known as Fancy Bear were busy breaking into the US Democratic National Committees servers, another group of agents known as Sandworm was hacking into dozens of Ukrainian governmental organizations and companies. They penetrated the networks of victims ranging from media outlets to railway firms, detonating logic bombs that destroyed terabytes of data. The attacks followed a sadistic seasonal cadence. In the winters of both years, the saboteurs capped off their destructive sprees by causing widespread power outagesthe first confirmed blackouts induced by hackers.But those attacks still werent Sandworms grand finale. In the spring of 2017, unbeknownst to anyone at Linkos Group, Russian military hackers hijacked the companys update servers to allow them a hidden back door into the thousands of PCs around the country and the world that have M.E.Doc installed.

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