Ivan Sekretarev/AP Photo
The Kremlin in Moscow, September 2017
The Open Mind explores the world of ideas across politics, media, science, technology, and the arts. The American Prospect is republishing this edited excerpt.
Alexander Heffner: Three years ago, Andy Greenberg learned of a group of hackers hitting Ukraine with relentless, what he calls disruptive cyber attacks, with effects that would soon spread globally, as we well know today. His book Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers tells that story of the first true cyberwar.
As Russia has attacked, Greenberg has not been far behind reporting on these incursions and Wired while searching for their perpetrators. “Like the best true crime writing, his narrative is both perversely entertaining and terrifying,” says the New York Review of Books and longtime national security advisor Richard Clarke adds about Greenburg’s book, “It’s an in-depth investigation of what the Russian military’s best cyber unit has already done to disrupt corporations, to penetrate utilities and to prepare for all-out cyberwar.”
It considers too how we might counter the Kremlin in the future. And it couldn’t be a timelier conversation to have, at least not ever I hope timelier than today because then we might be in the midst of a full scale digital Pearl Harbor or digital 9/11.
Andy Greenberg: Hopefully not too timely.
Heffner: Right, hopefully it doesn’t get any timelier. But I want you to start with the history of what occurred prior to the influence on the American campaign and the attacks, the bots and the trolls and the espionage that occurred during the 2016 cycle. Because the precursor to that is Ukraine. What happened in Ukraine?
Greenberg: In many ways this book is about how Ukraine is this canary in the coal mine, that you can look to Ukraine to see the future and to see very specifically what Russia is planning, what Russia is trying to carry out in [its] most insidious and aggressive maneuvers. As you were alluding to, before even the real story of this book gets started, just after the pro-Western revolution that happened in Ukraine, in early 2014 when Ukraine tore away from the influence of its Russian neighbors to the East and tried to embrace the EU.
Well, Russia invaded and seized Crimea and this touched off a Russian supported civil war in the East of Ukraine [and] they also began to carry out wave after wave of cyber attacks.
The very first of those was actually an attempt to hack the Ukrainian election. So Russian hackers—we would later learn they were in fact the same Russian hackers who meddled in the U.S. election who hacked the DNC, the DCCC, and the Clinton campaign. They tried to spoof the results of the Ukrainian election by hacking into the central election commission and adding fake results that they were actually then trumpeted on Russian television, even though the Ukrainian television station managed to take them down before they could be broadcast in Ukraine.
So it was clear that there was some coordination there. When I began looking at Ukraine actually, in late 2016, after the Russian attempts to interfere in the U.S. election, I saw that as maybe the first sign that you could see the future, by looking at Ukraine you could see how Russia was testing out new cyberwar information warfare capabilities in Ukraine.
And what was really chilling was that, well, first you could see that Russia hacked the Ukrainian election. Then they by then had already tried to hack our election, I think you can say, but they had also hacked so many other things in Ukraine, including even the power grid, causing the first-ever blackouts triggered by hackers. So did that mean that Russia was building a capability there that they also would use elsewhere in the world just as they had with their election meddling techniques?
You know those Ukrainian blackouts were a kind of harbinger of similar cyber attacks on electric utilities elsewhere in the world or the capability that Russia was trying to develop, it seemed like Ukraine was being used as a kind of test lab for cyberwar and capabilities that really threatened everyone in the West and elsewhere.
Heffner: I love that line from The Americans and we hosted Joe Weisberg, of course, the creator and writer of The Americans on when there is a military officer who to whom it’s explained looking at code, that’s what the future of the free world rests on that code. It seems at least ostensibly, like the Russians decided amidst this kind of nuclear detente and deterrent that this is where the future is.
Greenberg: Well, as you were saying, we don’t see much of the same kind of you know, the NSA and cyber command, U.S. forces hacking in the same sort of like massively disruptive ways.
