Berlin How does Putin tick under stress? In the Situation Room, the crisis center in the White House, the advisors to the American President have been brooding over how the Russian President, cornered by tough economic sanctions, will now hit back. Especially after Vladimir Putin threatened over the weekend that the West’s punitive measures would be “like a declaration of war” for him.
The crisis managers count a cyber attack on the Western financial system as one of the conceivable retaliatory measures taken by the Kremlin boss. The greater danger, however, could loom if Putin’s cyberwarriors undermine the nuclear deterrent.
So far, Putin has primarily used his cyber weapons to spread propaganda. Just the day before Russian tanks rolled over the Ukrainian border for the first time, Microsoft discovered a “wiper malware” with which Russian hackers apparently wanted to paralyze the Ukrainian government’s computers.
Otherwise, things are relatively quiet on the cyber front – which has surprised many experts: Russia is considered one of the smartest and most aggressive cyber powers of all, and Putin is a fan of hybrid warfare on virtual and real fronts.
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Many of the biggest cyber attacks of recent years – from the use of the NotPetya virus in Ukraine in 2017 to the SolarWinds attack in 2020 to last year’s digital attack on the main US gas pipeline Colonial – are attributed to Russian hackers. According to Microsoft, more than half of all state hacker attacks registered by the company last year came from Russia.
The lines between criminal gangs and cyber warriors working for the Kremlin are often blurred. So the elite hackers of the Russian group Sandworm in the service of Moscow’s military secret service GRU. to stand. In addition, US experts fear that Russian hackers have installed so-called “sleeper codes” in the software of Western infrastructure facilities such as power grids, which could be woken up by an attack signal.
“You could imagine a very rapid escalation that could be seen as an attack on NATO,” warns US Senator Mark Warner. In fact, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg last emphasized in 2019 that “a serious cyberattack” could trigger the alliance’s Article 5 of Assistance, which treats an attack against one ally as an attack against all.
As is well known, nuclear deterrence was supposed to prevent an escalation between the major powers in the first Cold War. However, the underlying strategy was devised by US diplomat George F. Kennan back in the 1940s.
Back then there was neither the internet nor cyber weapons, which are cheap, easy to deny and hard to control. Many believe that not a nuclear war but a “cyber war” between the great powers is the greatest threat of the 21st century.
In fact, it’s the combination of both. “New problems have arisen with the advent of cyberattacks on command and control systems, laser attacks on satellites, and autonomous weapon systems,” warns Harvard scholar Joseph Nye. The former US Deputy Secretary of Defense points out the often underestimated danger that cyber attacks can increase the risk of a nuclear war.
Ten minutes to save the world
How, I experienced first-hand a few years ago when Global Zero, an international organization for the abolition of nuclear weapons, invited me to a virtual reality (VR) simulation.
In the situation room, playing the role of the US President, I was supposed to fend off a supposed Russian attack with nuclear weapons – and had ten minutes to do it. I had three courses of action in front of me, the only difference being that the predicted number of victims fluctuated by tens of millions of lives. “We have new information,” a general called to me from a video screen just before the end of the nuclear deadline, “there was a cyber attack last night. So we can no longer be one hundred percent sure that the nuclear attack will take place at all.” What to do?
More: The cold war with Putin is more dangerous than the cold war with the Soviet Union