Abstract
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing war have, among many other security certainties, demonstrated for the first time the role of cyberspace in an open war of aggression and revealed developments worth considering. The objective of this paper is to analyze military activities in cyberspace in the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine based on publicly available information, and to assess them in terms of the previously prevailing notion of cyberwar as opposed to its actual role. Based on this, possible conclusions are considered, firstly regarding the future significance of cyber activities for Russia in times of peace and conflict in terms of the general military use of cyber assets, and secondly with regard to future international debates on the containment of cyberwar and the harmful use of cyber assets.
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Notes
- 1.
cf. Review analyses such as e.g. (Voo et al., 2020) or announcements by individual states, such as e.g. (Herpig et al., 2020) as well as (Lyu, 2019)
- 2.
See the “Cyber Policy Portal” of The United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), https://cyberpolicyportal.org
- 3.
See the analysis of the attack preparation and execution, as for example, extensively presented here and provided with further information: https://cyberlaw.ccdcoe.org/wiki/Viasat_KA-SAT_attack_(2022)
- 4.
For an explanation of the working group, see https://www.un.org/disarmament/group-of-governmental-experts/
- 5.
This is all the more true since hacking does not, in principle, require any specific military skills or tools. When selecting targets, groups like Anonymous have often focused on IT systems of public administration or of business and media companies in the past. Since such targets are usually publicly accessible from the Internet due to their regular use and are based on conventional IT systems, they do not require any high-value target information that could only be obtained through intelligence activities. Moreover, since such activities are more concerned with signaling to a perceived adversary than with specific longer-term disruptions, the selection of targets is generally flexible and does not relate to a very specific IT system, as is the case with military strategic planning.
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© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature
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Reinhold, T. (2024). Military Cyber Activities in Russia’s War Against Ukraine and Their Significance for the Debates on the Containment of a Cyberwar. In: Towards a Peaceful Development of Cyberspace. Technology, Peace and Security I Technologie, Frieden und Sicherheit. Springer Vieweg, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-43951-4_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-43951-4_7
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