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Credit to Author: Justin Ling| Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2022 11:00:00 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n Justin Ling<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories<\/a>.<\/p>\n To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories<\/a>.<\/p>\n When Russian president<\/span> Vladimir Putin launched his full invasion of Ukraine in February, the world expected Moscow\u2019s cyber and information operations to pummel the country alongside air strikes and shelling. Two months on, however, Kyiv has not only managed to keep the country online amidst a deluge of hacking attempts, but it has brought the fight back to Russia<\/a>.<\/p>\n Even Ukrainian officials are surprised by how ineffective Russia\u2019s digital war has been.<\/p>\n \u201cI think that the root cause of this is the difference between our systems,\u201d says Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine\u2019s 31-year-old minister for digital transformation. \u201cBecause the Russian system is centralized. It's monopolized. And it leads to the scale of corruption and graft that is becoming increasingly apparent as the war continues.\u201d<\/p>\n Speaking to WIRED from near Kyiv, Fedorov says his country has been preparing for this moment since Russia first invaded in 2014. \u201cWe have had eight years,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n In recent weeks, Fedorov and the Ukrainian government have deployed the controversial face recognition program ClearviewAI<\/a> to identify killed and captured Russian soldiers. They have deployed thousands of Elon Musk\u2019s Starlink terminals to keep the country connected, even amid Russian bombardment. They have crowdsourced intelligence collection, letting ordinary Ukrainians report troop movements. And, perhaps most critically, they have beaten back aggressive attempts to knock offline their internet, energy, and financial systems.<\/p>\n Fedorov, who also serves as deputy prime minister, ran Ukrainian president Volodmyr Zelensky\u2019s wildly successful election campaign in 2019, winning by nearly 50 points in the second round against incumbent Petro Poroshenko. He did so, in part, by leveraging authentic selfie videos to market the former comedian as an unconventional politician who eschews the normal trappings of politics. It\u2019s exactly that style of video that Zelensky has uploaded regularly from the streets of Kyiv<\/a> in recent weeks, offering a stark contrast with Putin\u2019s stiff proclamations<\/a> inside his palatial offices.<\/p>\n Ukraine has brought the war home to Russia in more cutting ways. In March, Reuters reported<\/a> that Ukraine had purchased face recognition software from American company Clearview AI to identify the bodies of Russian soldiers killed in action\u2014Kyiv later acknowledged that they were using this information to contact the families of the dead soldiers<\/a>.<\/p>\n Angela Watercutter<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Matt Burgess<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Morgan Meaker<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWe are pursuing two goals here,\u201d Fedorov says. \u201cFirst is: We are notifying their relatives, and telling them, basically, that it's not a very good idea to go to war with Ukraine. So that serves as a cautionary tale. And secondly, it's a humanitarian purpose\u2014just telling them where their relatives, or friends, or children are so that they don't try to get this information from the Russian authorities. Because, more often than not, they can't.\u201d<\/p>\n That decision hasn\u2019t come without criticism<\/a>. Contacting the families of soldiers killed in battle could be seen as harassment. Others have pointed out that being deployed in Ukraine is a PR coup for ClearviewAI, which has been embroiled in scandal over its liberal use<\/a> by police forces across North America.<\/p>\n Fedorov, for his part, says Russia \u201ccan spin this whatever way they want. But the fact of the matter is, there are tens of thousands of Russians dying in Ukraine, and we are just providing this information to their families because that serves, among other things, a humanitarian purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n There is a propaganda element to Kyiv\u2019s use of face recognition technology as well.<\/p>\n \u201cThis facial recognition plays to our, let's say, to our advantage in the information space,\u201d Fedorov says. Moscow has projected the image of a professional and volunteer fighting force. \u201cWe're trying to say that, for example, Russia is sending conscripts \u2026 we are proving that and justifying that with a lot of factual information. We can give you a list of hundreds of people who are 18 and 19 years old, with their names and with their birth dates and how and where specifically, they were conscripted. So that gives some substance to our claims.\u201d<\/p>\n Fedorov says the utility goes beyond just identifying the dead.<\/p>\n \u201cOne interesting case study of how we used Clearview AI,\u201d Fedorov says. \u201cThere was a man who was found in a Ukrainian hospital, claiming that he was a Ukrainian soldier who suffered from shell shock or some kind of trauma and that he forgot everything. And he was claiming that he was Ukrainian. So the doctor sent the picture to us, and we were able to ID him in a matter of minutes. We found his social network profile, and we established that he was Russian and, of course, he was brought to responsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n Ukrainian officials have said that the frequency of Russian cyberattacks tripled immediately prior to the war, and they have aggressively targeted critical infrastructure<\/a> since the war began.<\/p>\n But Viktor Zhora, deputy head of Ukraine's State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection, says Moscow may have maxed out its ability to launch attacks. \u201cRussian cyber operations likely reached their full potential," he says.<\/p>\n Zhora told WIRED that years of training, exercises, and cooperation with NATO have made Ukraine far more resilient to cyberattacks. Some attacks are easier to defend against than others\u2014as we spoke, Zhora said he was monitoring an active attack on the state administration of Lviv, which had been publicly announced by Russia hours earlier.<\/p>\n But Zhora stresses that while it is wrong to overestimate how powerful Russia\u2019s cyber capabilities are, it would also be wrong to underestimate its more \u201csophisticated\u201d operations. \u201cWe should continue to observe their potential, like Sandworm<\/a>, like a Fancy Bear<\/a>, like Gamaredon<\/a>, many other groups that are still active, and still very dangerous,\u201d he says, referring to a number of Russian government hacker groups.<\/p>\n Brandon Valeriano, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute who specializes in cyber operations, says offensive cyber operations don\u2019t mesh well with traditional, kinetic warfare. At best, he says, \u201cthey\u2019re enabling, they\u2019re complimentary \u2026 they don\u2019t transform it.\u201d<\/p>\n Valeriano points to a slowdown in the tempo of Russian-backed cyberattacks targeting the United States as evidence that Moscow\u2019s capacity isn\u2019t as expansive as some have assessed. \u201cThey\u2019re not organized for offensive cyber operations in the way that we think they are,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Kyiv\u2019s ability to beat back against those operations, Valeriano says, can be attributed to \u201cintense collaboration between Ukraine, Western powers, and NATO.\u201d Indeed, Five Eyes signals intelligence agencies have both been providing training and support for Ukraine\u2019s cyber defense and have been sharing threat intelligence. (Zhora stresses that information-sharing is a \u201ctwo-way road.\u201d)<\/p>\n Ukraine has been able to defend itself, both in cyberspace and in an outright propaganda war, because it has managed to stay online. For that, Fedorov credits a decentralized network of internet service providers and Elon Musk.<\/p>\n \u201cIt wouldn't be possible to restore 10 km of cable connection between villages in Chernigiv region after serious battles so quick,\u201d he tweeted<\/a> earlier this month. \u201cNormally it takes few months.\u201d But with one Starlink satellite, he says, five villages were reconnected in a matter of days.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have received over 10,000 Starlink terminals to date, and we use those where we have blind spots with, let's say, more traditional coverage,\u201d Fedorov says. \u201cSo we are trying very hard to restore and protect our landline and mobile connections.\u201d<\/p>\n Like any physical infrastructure, those Starlink terminals\u2014which have even managed to keep the embattled city of Mariupol online\u2014have been vulnerable to Russian shelling. Zhora says Russia has managed to hit some of those terminals but has not managed to target the system as a whole. \u201cI suppose that it was coincidence that some shells hit these terminals and locations,\u201d Zhora says. \u201cIt's not easy to identify and to attack them systematically.\u201d<\/p>\n Keeping Ukrainians online is a clear strategic objective for Ukraine. Photo and video evidence of the brutality being doled out by the Russian army has galvanized Western support for Kyiv and led to an unprecedented level of support from NATO to help the country defend itself.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also letting regular Ukrainians contribute to the collective defense.<\/p>\n During Zelensky\u2019s presidential campaign, Fedorov made particular use of the messaging app Telegram<\/a>, which is also popular with Russian intelligence operatives. In recent weeks, the app has been leveraged to collect evidence of possible war crimes in towns like Bucha, but also to enable Ukrainians to upload details of Russian troop movements. A Telegram bot collects photos and videos of Russian military movements, verifying Ukrainians through their digital ID,: a project spearheaded by Fedorov.<\/p>\n \u201cRegular internet users\u2014so, basically, civilians\u2014they can go and post photos of what's happening in Ukraine,\u201d Fedorov says.<\/p>\n The Ukrainian security ministry said in a tweet in March that those crowdsourced reports have directly contributed<\/a> to drone strikes against Russian tanks.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are actually very many ways that regular citizens can contribute to the effort,\u201d Fedorov says. One particularly \u201csuccessful vector,\u201d he says, is basically trolling. His government has been sending users \u201cinto the comment sections of posts by some very high traffic Russian influencers and just trying to talk sense into people and telling them that there's actually a war in Ukraine.\u201d<\/p>\n Fedorov is also responsible for Ukraine\u2019s IT Army,<\/a> a network of cyber activists and hackers who have targeted Russian systems. In recent weeks, they have dumped huge troves of personal information<\/a> from large Russian corporations.<\/p>\n Russia\u2019s poor information security has also been a significant factor in their fumbled invasion.<\/p>\n A huge number of technology providers, from cybersecurity firms to cloud hosting services, have pulled out of Russia since the start of the war\u2014either due to sanctions or to a concerted push from Fedorov and others in the Ukrainian government. \u201cIf the world were able to stop the delivery of these products to Russia, we see that they will have no infrastructure even to organize attacks,\u201d Zhora says.<\/p>\n Russia\u2019s attempts to knock out mobile and internet connections in Ukraine have mired their own communications. Their encrypted radio platform, Era, has been unreliable<\/a>, leading Russian soldiers to opt for unencrypted platforms. Numerous outlets have reported details<\/a> of conversations between Russians troops, their commanders, and their families\u2014some even admitting to possible war crimes<\/a> over unencrypted channels.<\/p>\n While Fedorov\u2019s reform mission has played a large role in modernizing Ukraine, support from the West has certainly helped. SpaceX and the United States have sent some 5,000 Starlink terminals. Fedorov says the European Union has provided some 10 million euros toward computer systems and workstations.<\/p>\n Asked what Ukraine needs as the war wears into its third month, Fedorov mentions satellite equipment, including more Starlink terminals, as well as laptops, tablets, and other tools \u201cto put our civilian infrastructure back online.\u201d He also jokes: \u201cLet's say that the most surefire way to keep us online for a very long time to come is to provide us with artillery, tanks, and warplanes\u2014because that will effectively end the war. And that will remove the problem altogether.\u201d<\/p>\n