If the world is to face into a wider war, this book tells us a great deal about how it will be fought. It may involve aircraft, tanks, warships, drones and so on. But a big element in any conflict will be cyber warfare. Indeed, in such a scenario, it may well be cyber weaponry that will determine which society or societies – if any – will survive and which will be destroyed.
Author Andy Greenberg is a senior writer for WIRED magazine, sometimes described as the bible of 21st-century digital technology. Here, he presents a narrative that is nothing short of terrifying, detailing the operations of an elite Russian cyber warfare unit within GRU military intelligence – number 74455 and codenamed Sandworm – that has already penetrated digital infrastructure around the planet, manifesting its destructive capabilities in Ukraine and elsewhere.
Russia’s missiles and bombers have inflicted enormous damage on Ukraine’s power systems, having already plunged the country into the darkness and cold of three eastern European winters. But Sandworm’s attacks on the country’s electricity grid had begun as early as 2014, according to Greenberg. In 2017 the Petya malware cyber attack on Ukraine’s power grid caused an estimated $10 billion in damage, making it the most costly cyber assault the world has known to date.
What the world faces now, according to the author, is “a hacking superpower waging cyber warfare without restraint, a new threat to the global order whose perpetrators will by no means be limited to Russia – and whose victims won’t be limited to Ukraine”.
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Operation Sandworm by Andy Greenberg: Terrifying narrative of a pervasive digital threat
The author’s apprehension over the capacities of aggressive states in cyber warfare is matched by concern in regard to the West’s – and particularly the United States’s – response to the sort of threat posed by Sandworm and similar projects, sponsored by Russia, China and others. The US C has called out the Russians on Sandworm, naming six key personnel and offering rewards for their capture.
But, as he points out, given America’s “fickle” foreign policy at this time, it remains to be seen whether it will hold a strong line on what amounts to cyberterrorism. Calling for a Geneva-style convention to limit state-sponsored cyber hacking, he concludes: “on the internet, we are all Ukraine”.
