Ukraine Documenting Russian Hacks, Eyeing International Charges
(Bloomberg) -- Ukrainian officials are documenting suspected Russian hacking incidents as part of a plan to prosecute Moscow in an international court, according to a top Ukrainian cybersecurity official.
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Victor Zhora, chief digital transformation officer of Ukraine’s special communications and information protection service, said the Ukrainian government is collecting evidence of malicious cyber activity from Russia and sharing the information with the International Criminal Court, a tribunal based in The Hague.
“Our intention is to bring this to justice after the war, and perhaps this will be the first prosecution of the first global cyber-war and cybercrimes that were conducted with kinetic operations and war crimes in Ukraine,” Zhora said during an interview at a cybersecurity conference in Singapore. “I hope this will happen.”
International officials have long debated the legality of state-sponsored hacking. The US, Russia and 23 other countries in 2021 voluntarily agreed to not conduct cyberattacks on foreign critical infrastructure during peacetime, terms that policy experts said have been undermined since the invasion of Ukraine.
US and European Union officials in May blamed the Russian government for a February cyberattack on the satellite company Viasat Inc., which knocked out communications in much of Ukraine in the hours prior to Russia’s invasion. Suspected state-sponsored Russian hackers also launched a series of digital assaults against Ukrainian targets prior to military movements, according to Microsoft Corp. research. Other distributed denial-of-service attacks flooded Ukrainian services with web traffic, knocking them offline and rendering them useless.
“We should combine the instruments of sanctions, financial and technological against all who participated in this illegal aggression against Ukraine, at least in cyberspace,” Zhora said.
Kyiv has weathered Russian cyber activity with minimal interruption due in part to Ukraine’s experience with NotPetya ransomware in 2017, Zhora said. In that instance, suspected Russian malware shut down Ukrainian banks, government agencies as well as the drugmaker Merck & Co. and the shipping giant A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S. The White House later blamed NotPetya on the Russian government, pegging the cost at an estimated $10 billion.
Ukraine has been preparing for another incident with the same impact, with help from allies including the US. Global IT companies, governments, partner agencies, consultants, hardware and software and cloud companies have all come together to help shore up Ukraine’s digital resilience, Zhora said.
“Ukraine is the primary target but not the final one,” he said. “If Ukraine is not able to defend itself then our closest neighbors would be next in this point. Ukraine defends the world in the battlefield and in global cyberspace.”
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