The war in Ukraine showed the ineffectiveness of large-scale cyber attacks – USA
In the presence of competent cyber defense, enemy attacks in cyberspace have an extremely limited effect.
The war in Ukraine has shown that causing significant damage to the enemy through large-scale cyber attacks is much more difficult than it seems. This was stated by the director of the US National Security Agency, General Paul Nakasone, in a commentary to The Wall Street Journal.
According to him, the United States views Russia as a “sophisticated player” who intends to carry out large-scale cyber attacks against the American state. Russians may primarily target business and government networks, databases and weapons systems.
A similar danger comes from China, which could also launch a large-scale cyber war against the United States in the event of an attempt to invade Taiwan. Chinese hackers are likely to target America’s power grid, transportation network, and telecommunications systems to sow panic and potentially weaken US aid to Taiwan.
“Much easier said than done,” General Nakasone comments on such threats and nods towards Ukraine.
He noted that Ukrainian and Western officials feared that as part of a full-scale invasion, one of the vectors of Russian strikes would be cyberspace. Devastating cyberattacks against Ukraine were supposed to support a military invasion in theory, but after a year of war, nothing has happened that goes beyond limited tactical operations to support military operations.
Major cyberattacks require synchronization, intelligence, tools, and capabilities to carry them out, Nakasone said.
“If you don’t have at least one of these elements, then I think, as we saw in February and later, it was much more difficult for the Russians to operate in this area of cyberspace,” he said.
Cyberattacks as a battlefield in the war of the Russian Federation against Ukraine
Russia is trying to terrorize Ukrainians with cyberattacks, because on the real battlefield, Russian successes are extremely limited and alternate with catastrophic defeats. Cyber attacks are redirected from military targets to the commercial, energy, financial, telecommunications and government sectors.
At the same time, it becomes obvious that the significant efforts that the aggressor makes to attack in cyberspace also do not bring a significant effect. Cyber attacks did not disrupt the performance of important systems and did not affect the performance of state bodies of their functions.
At the same time, Ukraine considers Russian cyber attacks to be war crimes. They will also become evidence for the subsequent tribunal in The Hague.