James Lewis, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’s Strategic Technology Program (left) Georgii Dubynskyi, Ukraine’s deputy minister of digital transformation (center), and Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator (right), speak at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit Sept. 9, 2022. (Photo courtesy of Billington Cybersecurity)
WASHINGTON — Seven months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian officials foresee the country going through a rapid “digital transformation” grown from desperate self-defense, though one said he fears the Russian threats in cyberspace are far from over.
“They [Russia] are trying to find a way how to undermine, how to defeat our energy system and how to make circumstances even more severe for Ukrainians,” Georgii Dubynskyi, Ukraine’s deputy minister of digital transformation, told reporters Friday. “We are preparing.”
Dubynskyi was speaking on the sidelines of the Billington Cybersecurity Summit, adding that he feared Russia would use “precision” cyber or hybrid attacks as their real-world invasion has stalled, according to VOA.
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Meanwhile, Dubynskyi said on a panel that Ukraine wants “not only to fight, but also to… continue our developments over digital transformation and we are ready to… take any modern technology and to test them in Ukraine” to develop a digital country.
Dubynskyi’s comments followed a pre-recorded video from Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov, who shared his vision on turning Ukraine into a top defense tech hub, noting “game changing technology” such as drones and the power of using cyber attacks against Russia.
Though Russia has used cyber attacks to coincide with military operations as far back as its conflict with Georgia in 2008, Fedorov argued that the war in Ukraine was the “world’s first cyber war and Ukraine is successfully dealing with it.”
“We’ve shown the whole world that Russia is not such a powerful state as everyone thought,” he said.
As a result, he said that strong security and military solutions could become Ukraine’s “main export and expertise” and that Ukraine’s volunteer “IT Army”, established during the onset of the war on Feb. 26 to address emerging cybersecurity threats and attacks that targeted Ukrainian government and bank websites, has been one of the country’s “bravest” projects.
The official IT Army of Ukraine Telegram channel currently has over 200,000 subscribers, though it’s unclear how many are active in any significant cyber operations. (Near the outset of the invasion, experts told Breaking Defense that calling up a volunteer hacktivist army was a potentially dangerous gamble.)
During the first three days of the war the IT army allegedly shut down a number of Russian government websites and propaganda TV channels, Fedorov said, and on a weekly basis, the hacktivist group “attacks about 200 websites.”
Beyond just cyber defense, he noted the IT Army has used artificial intelligence to identify faces of abandoned Russian soldiers, finding their social media accounts and then notifying relatives of their deaths. The group also has a database of postal services “looters” used to ship stolen foods from Belarus to Russia, according to the prerecorded video showing at the conference.
Before the invasion, Ukraine didn’t have an established cyber force like other countries, Dubynskyi said.
“Maybe it was our mistake, but we just decided to do that before the war,” he said.
Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator, said during the summit he was surprised by the lack of “significant successes” in the cyber realm from Russia after the first couple of days of the invasion.
“I mean, I’ll tell you this, I was surprised that there was not more of an attempt to shut down the Ukrainian internet, not just necessarily through cyber means, but purely through kinetic means,” Alperovitch said. “The fact that you were able to mobilize the world and President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy was able to put out videos every night on the internet that are watched by millions of people around the world is an enormous failure for the Russian military in not going after those critical communication nodes.”
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