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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34943 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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I was led to believe that Russia had the capacity to use cyberattacks to cripple large swaths of other nations' infrastructure for minimal cost and effort.

Maybe they still do, but somehow it hasn't been brought to bear in any way that has been noticeable outside the country.

There's a wide gap between being able to disrupt infrastructure and to cripple it. Most cyberattacks a country can pull off belong to the former capacity: log into a server controlling a water treatment plant and switch everything off. Crippling something requires a much more elaborate exploit.

So even if Russia can cyberattack Ukraine, this will not have a greater effect than just dropping missiles onto its power plants. Crippling its military communications would've been really useful when the war broke out, but it seems it was beyond Russia's capabilities.

Russia did some damage to Ukraine in cyberattacks at the start of the war (around 2014 or so), because Ukraine's cyber security, as pretty much every other security, was in shambles then. Look up Sandworm by Andy Greenberg, it has a loot of good info on that. But since then Ukrainians got their act mostly together (as much as any state actor can, there always be holes and human factor) and Russia didn't get any new capacities, so whatever damage they did has long been fixed and the new damage is nowhere near significant. They tried to attack in January 2022 but the most they could do is to deface some government websites, which is embarrassing but hardly crippling. Now Russia is back to shooting ballistic missiles into densely populated highrise buildings.

I dunno, I'd count a ransomware attack that locks operators out of control systems and access to data as 'crippling' for most pursuits, even if the physical infrastructure is unharmed.

Like with nuclear and biological weapons, that's not the shit-flinging contest you want to initiate unless you can ensure crushing supremacy. Israel can "cyberattack" Iran, because the retaliation is known to be relatively negligible. Russia can cyberattack Ukraine, maybe, but Ukraine has friends on the other side and they've got more and better hackers and superior tools, and they won't be as restrained in using those to strike back at Russia on behalf of Ukrainians as is the case with drone strikes on civilian infrastructure.

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