The Atlantic Council report released Tuesday stresses that Russia still poses a major threat to the U.S. in cyberspace, but its cyber operations are less centralized and coordinated than previously assumed. A fragmented mix of government agencies, criminal groups and loosely affiliated hackers may undermine the idea that Russian cyber operations are centrally directed or strategically cohesive, argues Justin Sherman, the report’s author.
In the days leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Western security officials and analysts were bracing for an all-out Russian cyber onslaught that would have delivered a “kill strike” like a country-wide power outage targeting Ukraine, Sherman writes, noting that “Ukrainian and NATO defenses … were sufficient to (mainly) withstand the most disruptive Russian cyber operations, compared at least to pre-February 2022 expectations.”
In the early hours of Russia’s incursion, Kremlin-tied hackers disabled some 40,000 KA-SAT Viasat modems used in Kyiv and other cities across Europe. They transmitted a wiper malware — dubbed later as Acid Rain — that triggered mass communications disruptions at the start of the war, both Viasat and the National Security Agency later concluded. But the cyberattack didn’t do much to kneecap Ukrainian forces in the long-term.
“Russia’s continued cyber activity and major gaps between wartime cyber expectations and reality demand a Western rethink of years-old assumptions about Russia and cyber power — and of outdated ways of confronting the threats ahead,” writes Sherman, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and CEO of Global Cyber Strategies.
The report recommends that U.S. policy ..
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