An Urgent Need for Cybersecurity

In June 2017, Russian hackers launched a malware attack on Ukraine called NotPetya. The attack, which locked users out of their own files unless they paid a ransom in bitcoin, was just one more tactic in the conflict between the two nations that had begun three years earlier. But viruses don’t respect borders, and this one spread far beyond Ukraine.

- James K. Glassman

It infected computers in Europe and the U.S., and even in Russia itself. Mondelez, the giant global food company headquartered in Chicago, was hit hard. NotPetya disrupted e-mail and logistics and caused $100 million in damage. The White House called it “the most destructive and costly cyberattack in history.” Total international destruction: $10 billion.

Nearly five years later, the Russians have invaded Ukraine and war is raging. Experts had been expecting more cyber devastation, but so far Russia has not knocked out Ukraine’s power grid or other important infrastructure. “I think the biggest surprise to date has been the lack of success for Russia with cyberattacks against Ukraine,” Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Vox.

It’s not from lack of trying. The U.S. government’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency issued an alert disclosing that leading up to its invasion, Russia “deployed destructive malware against organizations in Ukraine to destroy computer systems and render them inoperable.”