Potential damage: "Most notable was one [attack] in Ukraine in December 2015. It left roughly 230,000 people without electricity for about six hours during one of the coldest months of the year."
Thankfully, the article did clear that up, but the fact that my brain didn't even think, "that's a stupid idea that no one would buy that" is a bit depressing.
On the bright side, using these weapon grade malware is burning exploits and also showing current state and techniques of Russian cyberwarfare which defender can learn a lot from.
Or perhaps they used an already-known malware to measure defensive capabilities without showing any of their cards.
It is totally fair to say that in a digital context, Russia is absolutely at war with Europe.
As far as I can tell, they don’t even try to hide it.
[0] https://www.rt.com/news/265399-putin-nato-europe-ukraine-ita...
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ilanbenmeir/that-time-t...
Eversince notpetya and the colonial pipeline hack, the cyber strategy game changed a lot. Notpetya was genius as a deployment, because they abused the country's tax software deployment pipeline to cripple all (and I mean all, beyond 99%) businesses in one surgical strike.
The same is gonna happen to other tax software providers, because the DATEV AG and similar companies are pretty much the definition of digital incompetence wherever you look.
I could name other takedowns but the list would continue beyond a reasonable comment, especially with vendors like Hercules and Prophete that are now insolvent because they never prioritized cyber security at all, got hacked, didn't have backups, and ran out of money due to production plant costs.
But thanks for proving the point about Russia's disinformation war.
If they succeed they may well not be reversible. The question is if this had succeeded would we have shrugged it off again or responded appropriately?
Stuxnet destroyed centrifuges. It does not seem impossible that a sophisticated attack could shred some critical equipment. During the Texas 2021 outage -they were incredibly close to losing the entire grid and being in a blackstart scenario. Estimates were that it could take weeks to bring back power - all this without any physical equipment destroyed or malicious code within the network.
Edit: Had to look it up, the Texas outage was "only" two weeks and scattershot in where it hit. The death toll is estimated at 246-702.
Bloomberg had a decent article[0] about transformers and their lead time. They're currently a bottleneck on building. It wasn't paywalled for me.
"The Covid-19 pandemic strained many supply chains, and most have recovered by now. The supply chain for transformers started experiencing troubles earlier — and it’s only worsened since. Instead of taking a few months to a year, the lead time for large transformer delivery is now three to five years. " [0]
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-bottlenecks-transfor...
Vietnam too.
If you succeed in attacking the grid, you achieve the same widespread industry impact, without the cost of the munitions.
It can take decades to recover from a cyber attack like this, if it succeeds.
These attacks are widespread, damaging, and the repercussions are felt for decades in their wake. We _are_ being carpet bombed, and the costs for the victims are ongoing and growing. The collateral damage is everywhere.
Do you really think there's no impact?
> Cyber units from at least one nation state routinely try to explore and exploit Australia’s critical infrastructure networks, almost certainly mapping systems so they can lay down malware or maintain access in the future.
> We recently discovered one of those units targeting critical networks in the United States. ASIO worked closely with our American counterpart to evict the hackers and shut down their global accesses, including nodes here in Australia.
> https://www.intelligence.gov.au/news/asio-annual-threat-asse...
Did I say there's no impact?
It seems as if the European war has been pushed to the background recently, and most people kind of forgot about it. If you walk down the streets of Paris or Berlin does it look like it’s wartime, do people talk about it much, do they share the latest front news and so on?
Like what exactly would you want them to do? Run around screaming all day because there's a war in another country 2000 km away from them?
No, people just go on with their lives, doing their jobs, taking care of family and friends, paying their taxes, so that specialized workers in the ministry of defence can take care of the war stuff for them. That's how modern society works.
It's even similar in Kiev, when you walk down the streets you see people living their lives. Gyms, bars, cafes, clubs are full and lively. People don't stop living and enjoying their daily lives just because there's shelling somewhere else in the country.
While it's true to a certain degree, you make it sound like Kyiv residents are having a grand old time right now. But in reality, the majority are trying very hard to keep from freezing to death as Russian attacks targeting their power and heating infrastructure have destroyed much of it.
And "enjoying their daily lives" diminishes real tragedies of Ukrainians' daily lives.
[0] at least recently
We know the name of their leaders, their (ethno-religious) background, etc. They aren't Iranian. They aren't Muslim. They aren't Russian...
If someone makes tanks with paper for armour, because it cuts costs, they are to blame if those tanks catch fire.