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Story Synopsis:
Four fatal flaws? Ukraine's key challenges today are more than the war fought in its east.
How do you fight against an attack that can’t be traced definitively to a person or even a nation? NATO experts, Ukrainian politicians and journalists talk about how to defend Ukraine from hackers, who target key infrastructure like nuclear and chemical plants and have even tried to derail the Presidential elections.
About the four-part series Ukraine: The Unseen Attacks
Fighting in the east has come to characterize Ukraine. But Ukraine’s struggle for survival and self-determination, free of corrupt governments and Russian influence is fought on many other fronts. From cyber defence to internal defence, fixing its forces to telling the truth – Ukraine faces challenges that may determine its very survival.
Full script
=VOICEOVER =
Fighting in the east has come to characterize Ukraine. But Ukraine’s struggle for survival and self-determination, free of corrupt governments and Russian influence is fought on many other fronts.
In this program, we’ll look at four distinct challenges Ukraine faces in addition to fighting on its borders. From cyber defense to internal defense, fixing its forces to telling the truth – Ukraine faces challenges that may determine its very survival.
=GRAPHIC=
UKRAINE – THE UNSEEN ATTACKS
=GRAPHIC=
CYBER ATTACK
=VOICEOVER=
The day before the Ukrainian Presidential election results were announced, a hacker group calling themselves Cyber Berkut infiltrated Ukraine’s central election computer systems.
According to Ukraine officials, if the malicious software they installed had not been discovered and removed, it would have portrayed that ultra-nationalist Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh had won with 37 per cent of the vote instead of the one percent he actually received. Moderate Petro Poroshenko, the actual winner with a majority of the vote, would have been placed in second with 29 percent.
Cyber Berkut’s aim? To feed into the Russian myth that Ukraine had fallen to a fascist coup. That evening Russian Channel One aired a bulletin declaring Mr Yarosh the winner, quoting these exact percentages.
But cyber attacks can be more sinister than pushing Russian propaganda. BlackEnergy is a well-known cyber-crime toolkit that’s been in use since 2007, but over the summer of 2014, as tensions rose between Russia and Ukraine, a new version of the malware was detected being used by a mysterious group of hackers targeting Ukrainian government officials to harvest information.
=SOUNDBITE IN ENGLISH=
Tekin Kabasakal, Turkish Army, NATO Cyber Security Advisor to Ukraine
“It’s not easy to define the main source of cyber attacks, but when we think about the results and the aim of the attacks, we can guess that these are caused by Russians.”
=VOICEOVER=
The Black Energy hackers targeted government infrastructure like the Ukrainian Railway, creating proxy servers at key locations to divert traffic, which could have resulted in commuter deaths.
=SOUNDBITE IN RUSSIAN=
Serhiy Kandaurov, cyber defence expert, Director-General of Institute of International Research.
“Ukraine has a lot of serious and dangerous facilities in the chemical, nuclear sectors and also gas pipelines. Any debilitation of these facilities could lead to very serious ecological consequences for Ukraine and for Europe.”
=VOICEOVER=
The pattern of these attacks follows political events with chilling predictability. For example, a day after the recent announcement of an IMF loan to Ukraine, Ukrainian banks were attacked.
For Russian myth busting site Stop Fake, attacks not only follow a pattern, hackers and their junior cousins, trolls, become familiar faces.
=SOUNBITE IN UKRAINIAN=
Mykhailo Koltsov, Stop Fake webmaster
“The more popular the post, the more acute it is, especially after we published evidence of Russian forces in Ukraine, we noticed. After that we got a DDoS (denial of service) attack. They don’t even try to hide behind proxy servers, they come straight from Russia – Moscow, St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk. We have some old faces, as we call them and they can be recognized by their mistakes. They can change their IP address, but the grammar gives them away.”
=VOICEOVER=
While cyber defence experts can usually tell whether attacks are so called “patriotic hacking”, by lone actors or organized cyber-crime by large institutions, the answer remains the same. Vigilant and coordinated cyber defense. Ukraine doesn’t lack in expertise, but years of neglect and corruption in government institutions have led to a significant brain drain.
=SOUNDBITE IN ENGLISH=
Tekin Kabasakal, Turkish Army, NATO Cyber Security Advisor to Ukraine
“They have enough cyber security experts, for me I think, but they’re currently working in the private sector, because he earns much money in that. This is the main problem Ukrainian government and Ukrainian institutions faces.”
=VOICEOVER=
NATO has promised money for developing Ukraine’s cyber defense capabilities. It’s a project led by Allied countries Romania and Hungary and helped by Estonia, a Baltic country who had their own massive cyber attack in 2007, that most believe originated in Russia. Eight years later Allied countries like Estonia are well-placed to help Ukraine with a tactic they and other nearby countries find so familiar.
==SOUNDBITE IN RUSSIAN==
Serhiy Kandaurov, cyber defense expert, Director-General of Institute of International Research.
“Ukrainian politicians and experts in the field of cyber defense thought we could find some middle ground, between the western position and the eastern position, which is represented by Russia. But the latest historical events happening here, they confirm very precisely that we don’t have any choice. We have to use the existing experience of the United States and NATO countries to protect critical infrastructure.”
This version includes voiceover and graphics.
| Date Taken: | 03.31.2015 |
| Date Posted: | 07.14.2015 10:53 |
| Category: | Package |
| Video ID: | 414891 |
| Filename: | DOD_102588759 |
| Length: | 00:05:13 |
| Location: | KYIV, UA |
| Downloads: | 36 |
| High-Res. Downloads: | 36 |
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