What Americans Should Do to Prepare for Russian Cyberattacks
The Russian government is not likely, for the moment, to target American digital infrastructure, Daniel told me. “That would be a big escalation.” But American computers could still be compromised in collateral damage from Russian attacks on Ukrainian systems, as they have been in the past.
In 2017, for example, Russian military-intelligence hackers sent malware known as NotPetya into Ukrainian computer networks. As the infection spread, a small U.S. hospital system lost the use of every Windows machine in its arsenal, and dozens, if not hundreds, of other hospitals were hamstrung when a widely used transcription service for electronic medical records went down. Any company that does business in Ukraine—and any person or business doing business with that company—could be vulnerable to this sort of collateral damage, Daniel said. “No one really fully understands how the internet interconnects and operates together at some sort of macro level, so being able to map out all the possible permutations of how something might have an impact is essentially impossible ahead of time.”
Herbert Lin, a senior research scholar at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, told me that direct attacks are still on the table. When it comes to patriotic hacking, he said, “the Russians have elevated it to an art form.” If the U.S. continues to escalate sanctions and Russia decides to retaliate with cyberattacks, Putin might target the technology that supports U.S. infrastructure.
American banks have been shoring up their cyberdefenses, but “they’ve never had to withstand a full-on, all-in cyberattack by a nation as powerful in cyberspace as the Russians,” Lin said. Municipal power and water authorities would likely be more vulnerable, he said, because many of them don’t have extra money to spend on cybersecurity. And if Russia chooses to allow domestic cybercriminals to operate without consequences, as it’s done in the past, they could simply go after whatever foreign companies and systems seem like the easiest, most lucrative targets. None of these is a particularly likely scenario, Lin emphasized, but any of them are possible.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/02/ukraine-war-russian-hack-cybersecurity/622922/