The increase in tensions between the United States and Russia due to Moscow amassing troops on the border with Ukraine is raising concerns Russia may not only put boots on the ground but also turn to hacking operations to put pressure on the U.S. and Ukraine.
Those concerns are underlined by massive hacking efforts by Russia against Ukraine over the past few years and the ransomware attacks linked to Russian hackers against critical U.S. organizations.
“This is a Russian calling card,” Mark Montgomery, senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told The Hill Wednesday. “I do worry that they will use their cyber and disinformation tools to try to undermine the stability of the Ukrainian economic security and national security.”
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Ukraine is no stranger to Russian aggression in cyberspace and has often been viewed by experts as a testing ground for Russian cyber capabilities, with attacks ramping up after fighting broke out between the two nations in 2014.
In 2015, hackers later linked to Russia took down portions of Ukraine’s power grid in an attack that resulted in almost a quarter million Ukrainians losing power and heat in the dead of winter. A similar attack against companies supporting Ukraine’s power grid took place in 2016.
The NotPetya malware virus, released by Russian hackers in 2017 just prior to Ukraine’s Constitution Day, targeted Ukrainian banks, newspapers, and other essential companies, wreaking havoc. The malware eventually spread across much of the world, causing billions of dollars in damage and becoming one of the most destructive cyberattacks in history.
The Justice Department last year
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