The Ukrainians, massively backed by the United States, managed to defend themselves against Russian cyber offensives early in the conflict that began on Feb. 24, 2022, French cyber defense commander General Aymeric de Bonnemaison said on Thursday.
“The scoop of this conflict for all today’s cyber commanders is that the defense can take over the offensive: I manage to contain myself and reorganize,” he argued, returning to the press on the first cyber lessons he learned from the Russo-Ukrainian conflict.
“Cyber Pearl Harbor Didn’t Happen”
During this war in Ukraine, “cyber Pearl Harbor did not happen. But that doesn’t mean it can’t happen,” he warned, recalling the case of Costa Rica, which was crippled by a series of massive ransomware attacks in 2022.
In the case of Ukraine, the Russian cyber offensive against Kyiv did not start in 2022, but as early as 2014, the year of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and was accompanied by “Russian maneuvers of influence to foment public discontent,” he said.
But “during that time, Ukrainians went into the market, they provided cyber defense budgets and relied on Western partners,” he said. At the beginning of the war, the Russians smashed Ukrainian computer networks “everywhere”: they deleted websites, denied access and attacked the Ukrainian government and its leaders “to isolate them”.
A second wave manages to hit the communications routers used by the Ukrainian military, but the network provided by the American SpaceX “Starlink has arrived to provide a capacity for the troops,” he described.
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An effective Ukrainian defense
Against the Russians, “there was a very good defense, anticipation of action to seek prepositioning,” with the help of the US government and GAFAM, including Microsoft, the general argued.
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“Ukrainians needed help, the United States is way ahead of us and filling a gap,” he said. “On the other hand, this calls into question our capacity and our mutual support mechanisms,” he stressed, recalling that the European objective is “to exchange a lot of information of cyber interest very quickly”.
As the conflict progressed, the number of cyberattacks slowed down significantly because the Russians “have partially exhausted their offensive capacity” and “Ukrainian defenses have reached such a level that they are very complicated,” he noted. If offensive combat is effective from the very beginning of the conflict, “there is no longer a need to attack a power plant’s computer when bombing it,” the general concluded.