Why hasn’t Russia Won the Cyber War?

Given Russia's history of cyber-attacks, many thought this would form an integral part of their invasion of Ukraine. But thus far, they haven't been particularly effective. So why is this? And what does this all mean about the future of modern warfare?

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Sources:

[happyelephant]

As a Ukrainian, I can confirm that before war, many preparation guides included recommendation like buy radio set because it was considered obvious that mobile network and internet would be crashed by cyberatacks.

[Dave]

Maybe all those elite hackers fled the mobilisation. Or got mobilized.

[CyanOgilvie]

Another aspect is that anyone operating at scale on the internet these days is already effectively in an all-out cyber war. The website I write software for is attacked dozens of times a day just in the normal course of things - we're all hardened veterans. Just serving the attack attempts normally would require about 4 times the compute capacity we currently use for the legitimate traffic on site, and those aren't even explicit DoS attempts, just dumb scans for common vulnerabilities. The point is, if your average Tuesday looks like a war zone already, then the impact of another source of attacks doesn't change the picture much. Granted, a state-actor likely has better attacks available to it than your average script kiddie, but those are very expensive to develop and, once used, become much less valuable because once they're known they're quickly fixed and become useless. So if you're the NSA and you've compromised the Intel management engine and can do whatever you want to nearly any connected system even if it's "off", you don't use that asset to take down a power station and reveal your hand because you would lose the asset. Something like that would be very sparingly used, and only for very high value intel and every effort made to conceal the fact that the systems were compromised.

[tanyapavlova]

I think part of the reason why the impact is not as large is that people learned a lot of lessons from attacks like StuxNet and the Russian attack on the Ukrainian Oblenergo in 2016 (worth reading the papers on both), among many others and started working on defense in depth. All the phishing training people received, all the anomaly detection and monitoring on networks, network segmentation, etc has made the a lot of attack paths unfeasible. Take log4j 0-day last year. The community knew very quickly about it, a new secure version was released very quickly and people were updating dependencies as fast as possible, but also intrusion protection and detection systems helped identify any breaches and stop them in their tracks and good cyber security practices employed means that it is a lot harder for an attacker to create the whole cyber killchain then it was back in the early 2010s. Also the cyber community itself is very open and sharing information and disclosing vulnerabilities and breaches and publishing reports about attacks and coming up with new defense capabilities. Sharing is caring.

[rhea]

'Russian competence' now sounds like an oxymoron

[envysart]

This is not unlike the threat of gas attacks during WW2. There was every opportunity for the threat of a gas attack in the Blitz, but so much effort was put into preparedness it wasn’t even worth it.

Preparation and planning does seem to be the key.

[mjhopgoodswe]

Shortly after my country made a move to join NATO, a government agency’s network went down for part of a day.

Given that Russia had threatened us with consequences, suspicion was cast in their direction but it was never confirmed.

[JAGzilla-urlh]

Man, the one time I actually WANTED to see a Nord VPN ad at the end of a video, we got Nebula.

[anitagorse]

How many IT specialists left Russia? 25%? Yeah, good luck with cyber warefare. They can't be easily replaced.

[GrayFoxHound]

"why hasn't russia won cyber war"
2 months ago, when lights started to be turned off, we had people spamming in ua internet "enough with this flour!"

This is very smart russian tactic of using google translate on their word 'suffering'. Unfortunately for them, both suffering and flour is written the same in russian, but not in ukrainian.

[Cainthegodslayer]

"I'm yet to meet one that can outsmart bullet" - a wise man. To put it bluntly, until software can physically stop a 155mm howitzer shell or penetrate composite steel armor, conventional warfare will not disappear.

[kilonaliosI]

"while drones have played a role in this war...." and that ladies and gentlement is the understatement of the year

[MarkfrmCanada]

I still get a chuckle out of stock footage of "hackers". Yes, I'm sure the hackers sit in the dark with their hoods up and their sunglasses on they do the hackings!

[lacoma]

Perhaps the reason Russia's cyberwarfare forces haven't materialised is because some of those forces are independents or foreign nationals on the payroll of Russia; and because this places them far away or otherwise outside of Russia's control, a lot of those cyberwarfare forces just plain walked out on Russia since they don't support the war? It could also be that their cyberwarfare forces are in defence and repair mode thanks to anonymous cyberattacks.

[Whalebelly]

Animation and editing was stepped up a notch, right? Good stuff, good video! Really interesting topic too.

[patrickcunniff]

I recently retired in this industry. I will say it is a vibrant industry for the right person. There has been a recent awakening by firms that did not take the threat seriously. The reason for the hype is as always the money comes from folks who do not understand the threat and they hype to get this project or that one. Also the US has the ability to shut down countries but we don't.

[Bradyboy]

Even after all this, I hear the word war and can only think of Ron Perlman saying: War, War Never changes.

[marvinvogtde]

Isn't there a "be" missing in the title?

[IamTheHolypumpkin]

While not really cyber warfare, I know that at the beginning of the War "the Internet" in an act of "what the internet can do best" decided to DDOS, Hack, Spam and Troll everything related to the russian government.
It certainly did helped :( but it didn't hurt either.

[ScrapKing]

With the first word of the video being “War, ” and then a pause, I expected him to subsequently ask “What is it good for?” And then answer his own question by saying “Absolutely nothin’.”