MAY JUNE 2018 | MOTHER JONES 31oleh derevianko was on the road to his
parents’ village in Ukraine on a bright
June day in 2017 when he got a call from
the ceo of a telecommunications com-
pany. Computer systems were failing at
Oschadbank, one of the largest banks in
Ukraine, and the ceo suspected a cyber-
attack. Could Derevianko’s digital security
firm investigate? Derevianko told his re-
sponse team to look into it and kept driv-
ing. Then his phone buzzed again. And
again. Something big was happening.
Across Ukraine that day, cash regis-
ters suddenly shut down. People trying to
withdraw money saw demands for ransom
appear on atm screens. Lawmakers in the
country’s parliament could not access their
laptops. Turnstiles in Kiev’s subway stopped
working, and departure boards at the air-
port went down. Technicians at Chernobyl,
the site of the deadly nuclear disaster in
1986, had to manually check radia tion levels
after their computers failed.
It became clear to Derevianko that
this was no random malware. It was an
act of cyberwar—the latest digital attack
from Russia. The Kremlin had previously
targeted Ukraine with information war-
fare, using social platforms to spread pro-
paganda that exploited ethnic divisions.
It had also launched cyberattacks on elec-
tion systems and the power grid. But this
attack was the biggest one yet—designed
to simul taneously bring down multiple sys-
tems to create maximum chaos.
If that progression sounds ominous, it
should. Ukraine, many cybersecurity ex-
perts believe, showed the evolution of Rus-
sia’s digital-disruption arsenal. And while
the debate over Moscow’s interference inthe United States has focused
on disinformation and email
hacking, other cyberweapons
could be even more destruc-
tive. “Any type of attack,”
Derevianko told me as we
sat in his firm’s glass-walled
conference room in the cap-
ital, Kiev, “can be launched
against the United States.”
I first visited Ukraine in
2008, when I took a two-
and-a-half-hour flight
from Tbilisi, Georgia. That
summer, Russia invaded
Georgia and launched cyber-
attacks against its govern-
ment, and there were plenty
of worries that Ukraine was
next. And indeed, in February
2014, Russian special forces
flooded Crimea, and Russian
troops soon started showing
up in eastern Ukraine to fight
alongside ethnic separatists.
I’ve visited Ukraine at
least three times a year ever
since, and each year the dis-
ruption from cyberattacks
has grown. In 2015, hack-
ers went after the electrical
grid and shut off power to
225,000 Ukrainians. Another attack, in
2016, blacked out one-fifth of Kiev. And
last year came the multipronged offensive
that would eventually be known as Not-
Petya (after the Petya ransomware that it
partially mimicked).
Jessica Robinson is the ceo of the
cyber security company PurePoint Inter-
national. Like many digital security pro-
fessionals I interviewed for this story, she
is convinced Ukraine is “ground zero from
the standpoint of being hacked and at-
tacked by Russia. There’s so much that
could be learned there.”
There is plenty of indication that
Moscow has at least tested the possibility
of similar attacks in the United States. As
far back as 2014, Russian hackers compro-
mised 500 million Yahoo accounts. In 2016,
Russia-backed actors attempted to breach
electoral systems in 21 states, according to
the Department of Homeland Security. (So
far, the administration has refused to pub-
licly confirm which ones.) And in March,
fbi and HomelandWEAPONS OF MASS DISRUPTION
When it comes to Russian cyberattacks, we’ve seen nothing yet.
by terrell jermaine starr(continued on page 69)Security experts fear
that Trump’s refusal
to challenge Putin will
leave America exposed
to attacks even more
devastating than what
happened in 2016. ADAM VIEYRA; ZOCHA_KGETTY; MLADN61GETTYMAY JUNE 2018 | MOTHER JONES 31