Russia’s dreade cyberwarriors seem to be struggling in Ukraine

Russia One day after Russian tanks broke through Ukrainian border posts on February 24, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a rare “Shields Up” alert warning that “every organization — large and small — must be prepared to respond to disruptive cyber activity.

The expectation was that Russia would attack not only Ukraine but also Ukraine’s western allies.

For some reason, that hasn’t really happened in a big way.

“We haven’t seen anything that we can directly attribute to Russia turning its sights to Canada,” Sami Khoury.

Russia’s cyberwarriors to be struggling in Ukraine.

Head of the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, told CBC News. “There’s been probably spillover effects in some cases, but we haven’t seen anything that is directly targete.  The Canadian infrastructure or Canadian ecosystem.”

Instead, Russia has found itself being hacke  in one instance with embarrassing. That surely must have marred President Vladimir Putin’s Victory Day extravaganza.

As RuTube, Russia’s version of YouTube, was taken down by hackers. YouTube itself remaine online in Russia and continued sharing videos demonstrating Ukraine’s dominance of the information space in this war.

Hacktivist groups such as Network Russia.

Battalion 65 have stolen reams of emails and data from Russian government and corporate sites. In March, for the first time ever, more Russian email credentials were leake online than those of any other nation.

The Kalush Orchestra from Ukraine appear on stage after winning the 2022 Eurovision Song Contest in Turin, Italy, May 15, 2022. (Yara Nardi/Reuters)
Russian hackers even failed to disrupt voting in the Eurovision Song Contest. (Ukraine won.)

Just as Russia’s armoure divisions entered this conflict with a fearsome reputation that turne out to be wildly overblown. The reach of Moscow’s cyber legions may have overestimat. And just as Russia’s war has diminished the reputation of Russian arms, it might also lead to a reassessment of nations’ relative strengths in the virtual world.

Ukraine had every reason to expect the worst Russia.

A Russian “persistent threat group” known as Sandworm was behind a December 2015 attack on the Ukrainian electrical grid that caused widespread power outages.

A year later, in December 2016, the Ukrainian financial system was targete by the Black Energy malware attack which also caused power cuts in Kyiv.

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