Cyberwar Guide
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RAIGO PAJULA/Getty Images01__Estonia 2007:__ When the Estonian government decided in April 2007 to move a statue of a Russian soldier from the center of its capital in Tallinn, the move touched off massive protests by the country’s Russian-speaking minority. Those riots were accompanied by a wave of crude distributed denial-of-service attacks that took down hundreds of Estonian websites, likely launched with the backing of the Russian government.
DMITRY KOSTYUKOV/Getty Images02Georgia 2008
__Georgia 2008:__ The next year, very similar cyberattacks were used during Russia’s war in Georgia, bombarding the country’s web sites at the same time as Russian tanks rolled toward its capital and Russian ships blockaded its coastline. As relatively crude as the online attacks may have been, they were perhaps the first time that widescale digital attacks were combined with a physical invasion.
Getty Images03__Stuxnet, 2009:__ Starting in 2009, an ingenious piece of malware known as Stuxnet began to infiltrate the the network of Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz, silently altering the settings of its fragile centrifuges to destroy them and sabotage the country’s quest for a nuclear weapon. Only when the worm accidentally spread to the rest of the world in 2010 was the operation revealed and, two years later, confirmed to be the work of the NSA and Israeli intelligence.
SeongJoon Cho/Getty Images04__Saudi Aramco, 2012:__ Just two months after Stuxnet was confirmed to be a US- and Israeli-led operation, a piece of malware known as Shamoon hit oil giant Saudi Aramco, destroying 35,000 computers. The attack, the largest of its kind ever seen at the time, was quickly tied to Iranian hackers, and seen as a proxy attack against US interests in retaliation for Stuxnet’s sabotage.
Christopher Polk/Getty Images05__Sony, 2014:__ In late 2014, hackers calling themselves the Guardians of Peace ripped through the network of Sony Pictures, stole and leaked vast amounts of data including unreleased films, destroyed thousands of computers, and demanded that Sony not release its Kim Jong Un assassination comedy, “the Interview.” Though the hackers at first appeared to be cybercriminals demanding a ransom, the FBI soon revealed that they were in fact North Korean state-sponsored hackers..jpg)
Yevhenii Volchenkov/Getty Images06__Ukraine, 2015:__ Two days before Christmas in 2015, Russian hackers triggered the first-ever blackout induced by a cyberattack, turning off the power to hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians. The attack came in the midst of Russia’s physical invasion of the country’s eastern region and Crimean peninsula, and was both preceded and followed by a severe series of data-destroying attacks, culminating in another blackout targeting the country’s capital in late 2016.
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Susana Gonzalez/Getty Images07__NotPetya, June 2017:__ Russia’s cyberwar against Ukraine climaxed in June of 2017, when it released the NotPetya malware, seeding the data-destroying worm onto thousands of machines via the hijacked software updates of the Ukrainian accounting software M.E.Doc. But as NotPetya devastated Ukraine’s networks, it also spread to multinationals like Maersk, Merck, FedEx, and many others, causing a record-breaking $10 billion in damages.
HASSAN AMMAR/Getty Images08__Triton/Trisis, August 2017:__ Just months after NotPetya, an oil refinery owned by Saudi Arabian firm Petro Rabigh was shutdown by a sophisticated piece of malware known as Triton or Trisis. But it could have been much worse: Analysts found that the mysterious malware, which showed traces of a Russian science institute’s fingerprints, had been designed to turn off safety systems in the plant, potentially triggering a lethal accident.
