After an hour, the broadcast was broken where Ukraine played against Wales for a ticket to the World Cup. The football drama was replaced for the Ukrainian viewers by Russian state television. One in a series of over 400 hacker attacks that have hit Ukraine in recent months. Of the more serious kind was an attack on the country’s electricity grid, which was averted before it had time to make 2 million Ukrainians without electricity.
– We have experience of cyber threats, Ukraine has become a kind of training area for cyber weapons, states Victor Zhora who is visiting Sweden to meet Swedish cyber security experts.
In 2015, parts of the electricity grid were shut down. In 2017, it was at the epicenter of a massive cyber attack that also affected companies abroad. In addition to the physical war that began as early as 2014 in the Crimea, in recent years there has been a lot of exercise on the cyber side as well.
– When we understood that a full invasion was underway at the end of the winter, we were aware of the cyber threats that would support the operation.
“Is there a risk of cyber weapons”
In addition to individual attacks on infrastructure such as telecom and electricity supply, these are often cyber attacks that are coordinated with military attacks.
– Like when government sites were attacked at the same time as the missiles crashed in Odessa. You want to achieve a psychological effect, give the feeling of superiority in both the physical and the virtual world.
Many experts feared worse digital damage than Russia has done so far. Has the Russian cyber-attack capability been overestimated?
– They can do great damage, but now there are a lot of cyber attacks against Russia as well, so they also have to work with defense, which ties up a lot of their resources, answers Marcus Murray, IT security expert at Truesec.
How do you view the risk of cyber attacks on Sweden during the NATO application?
– It takes time for the Russians to change, and aim for Sweden instead. But if there is a protracted application, due to Turkey, then there is a risk that they will have time and think it is worth using cyber weapons as a tool to influence our NATO application.