Illia Vitiuk is a top Ukrainian intelligence official. For him, the war with Russia is primarily in cyberspace — and in a rare exclusive interview with NPR, he says its far from over.
Ukrainian Security Service
"Our focus shifted to Russia because we needed to protect ourselves, and not from a ransomware group, but from real specialists and people focused on damaging our infrastructure, the real professionals with budgets, with laboratories, and research institutes," said Vitiuk.Starting around December of 2021, there was a major buildup of Russian cyber activity that made many in Ukraine's private sector fearful the invasion was imminent.
Some of those attacks included one that temporarily knocked out ViaSat, the satellite communications system the Ukrainian military was using at the time. When that failed to prevent Ukraine's Armed Forces from communicating, Vitiuk said Moscow summoned"all the special services and the so-called hacktivist groups" to create chaos in cyberspace and in the information space.
"Since the summer, they understood this war is going to last longer, and they need to switch to something more serious," he said. It's an ongoing challenge to protect frontline troops' digital footprints. While some units employ technical cybersecurity experts, others don't have the same resources. As a result, technology like physical tokens for two-factor authentication have become more popular with soldiers, sources in Ukraine revealed.
"This is very important, and there should be a new methodology to understand casualties when we speak about cyberattacks," said Vitiuk."Because nobody's shooting, but there could be casualties nonetheless ... people in hospitals without electricity, somebody can die."Cyber volunteers, hacktivists and criminals
General view of a residential building after it was damaged following a Russian shelling attack as Russian forces continue their full-scale invasion of Ukraine since Feb. 24, 2022.SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images "This is like our cyber territorial defense," he said."It's our job to monitor and understand these cyber volunteers, and to some extent, to direct them or give them advice on where to be more effective.""There was literally a line of people standing at the Security Service of Ukraine, calling, text messaging, etc., and asking, how can we help? What should we do?" Vitiuk said.
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