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The ruthless Russian hacking unit that tried to crash Ukraine

To understand the evolving, shadowy world of cyberwarfare, start with Ukraine. “You can’t really find a space in Ukraine where there hasn’t been a [cyber] attack,” a NATO ambassador tells Wired correspondent Andy Greenberg. “Turn over every rock, and you’ll find a computer network operation.” Beginning in 2015, Ukraine was on the receiving end of vicious cyberattacks that experts later determined were launched by Russia. The attacks were ruthless, targeting every aspect of Ukrainian society: government servers, media organizations, transportation hubs. Ukrainian cyber experts watched helplessly as systems began to crash all around them. There were no public schedules or train service one day. ATMs went dark the next. The coup de grace came when the hackers targeted the electricity grid, plunging hundreds of thousands of innocent Ukrainians into darkness.


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