Private Techs Crucial in Repelling Russian Cyberattacks on Ukraine

Support from private companies such as Amazon and Google was essential to defending Ukraine from Russian cyberattacks before and after the 2022 invasion, analyst Keir Giles said today.

The director of the Conflict Studies Research Center said that Ukraine has received large-scale state-level cyber defense assistance from countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and others.

However, he highlighted that private industry “has added a unique new factor to this conflict that we have not seen before.”

Among the best-known companies, he mentioned Amazon, which “organized the evacuation of important government data” and Google, which “extended its protection against low-level attacks to Ukrainian media outlets and a whole range of other Ukrainian websites critical in the days leading up to the invasion”.

“Without this additional external support, it would have been much more difficult for Ukraine to resist the level of attacks we have seen,” he said during the debate “Resisting Russian Information Warfare: Lessons from Ukraine” organized by the British Institute of International Relations (Chatham Casa, Lar).

This assistance also took place in Ukrainian companies and civil society, said former journalist Olga Tokariuk, current researcher at Chatham House.

“Many Ukrainians and technology companies have joined the resistance effort, offering the government their services and capabilities. Some of them are using new technologies, artificial intelligence, and cooperating with the government to detect Russian disinformation and influence campaigns” , he revealed.

Ukrainian ‘hacktivist’ groups have also mobilized to repel Russian cyberattacks and ordinary citizens have sought to intervene by combating disinformation on social media, he added.

Tokariuk stated that the ban on the broadcast of Russian channels in Ukraine even before the invasion was important because it reduced Moscow’s ability to “disrupt and penetrate the information space, to pollute it”, as it did when it invaded Crimea and Donbass in 2014.

“It was a decision criticized by some organizations at the time, but it proved to be really crucial because, at the time of the large-scale invasion, Ukraine did not have these hostile agents operating on its territory”, he argued.

The director of the ‘Eyes on Russia’ project created by the Center for Information Resilience, Belén Carrasco Rodriguez, said that Russian information activity has been more successful in the occupied territories.

“There have been a series of activities focused on providing humanitarian aid, child care, support for women in occupied territories in order to provide a sense of comfort that raises awareness among the population, such as the perception of this image of liberators”, he exemplified.

This strategy is expanded by incorporating pro-Russian propagandists into military units and battalions on the ground, filming soldiers providing humanitarian aid or celebrating or organizing celebrations such as International Children’s Day.

“This type of content is then disseminated across different communication channels in order to build this image of Russians as liberators, as opposed to Russians as occupiers,” he explained.

Keir Giles said that Russia was a pioneer in the comprehensive use of information warfare, combining cyber attacks with disinformation, psychological operations, influence and strategic communications.

Western NATO countries have since become more attentive to the use of this type of weapons, he revealed, but “the problem is that the Russians have been working on this for 20 years, so there is a lot to do.”