The invasion of Ukraine bears the hallmarks of hybrid warfare. As Arsalan Bilal explains:
"...hybrid warfare involves the interaction or combination of conventional
and unconventional instruments of force and diversion. The said instruments
or tools are combined in a synchronized manner to exploit the weaknesses of the
adversary and achieve a synergistic effect."
Thus, in addition to armed forces and operations
terrorist and diversionary activities, we have disinformation actions in the media and attacks
in cyberspace. Let's deal with the latter.
Cyber attack predictions in 2022
As early as November 2021, Eset researchers predicted an intensification of
attacks in cyberspace emphasizing their increasing politicization.
They probably did not have the aggression against Ukraine in mind at the time, although they could not
fail to note such operations back in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea.
Among the predictions for 2022 are serious cyber threats linked to devices
mobile devices. They have always been the target of attacks by cybercriminals, who either steal
valuable information or introduced disinformation and inconvenience to users.
"Cyber criminals will continue to take advantage of remote work. Attackers will
continue to exploit unsecured or unpatched computers of people
working remotely to infiltrate corporate networks. We will continue to
observe social engineering used to steal credentials
and brute force attacks on corporate services to gain access to poorly protected servers."
What about hybrid warfare and attacks on other countries in cyberspace?
Here the vision is quite optimistic, but there is still no end in sight to aggressive
violent cyber attacks. "States will clearly define acceptable cyberattack practices.
(...) some countries will publish their own taxonomy of cyber attacks, distinguishing the
acceptable types of activities of this type."
Time will tell.
For now, we have open conflict and invasion in Ukraine.
How is she doing in cyberspace?