Fresh strain of pro-Russian wiper flushes Ukrainian critical infrastructure A new strain of wiper malware targeting Ukrainian infrastructure is being linked to pro-Russian hackers, in the latest sign of Moscow's evolving cyber tactics. An unspecified critical infrastructure entity in Ukraine was targeted by a never-before-seen wiper strain that researchers at Cisco Talos are calling PathWiper. Talos …
No, and inappropriate.
First, your critical infrastructure should not connect to the public internet, so should be safe.
Second, an invasion is not a war/fight, it is a rape. The rules of war/pugilism do not apply. There are no restrictions in self-defence.
The appropriate response to an invasion from day 1 is to use insurgents to abduct and vanish the invader's MPs, senior military, key regime members, and the wealthy who enable the regime.
Targeted strikes on their internet/telco backbone will end their membership of the modern world.
Still not surrendered and left your turf after a month or two of damage? Well, you gave them a chance to mend their ways. Time now to target their crown jewels. For any fossil fuel rich nation, that would be their energy resources. Small bombs, big bangs. The pipes, the wells, the fields, the nukes. You would be able to see your invader's country burning from Mars.
That should do it. Someone invades your country, it shouldn't be a 'war', it should be the end of their regime. 3 years? It shouldn't last more than 3 months.
The battlefield stuff and the cyber stuff is just a brutal, unethical sideshow. The people who organise wars and invasions should be the people that suffer and pay for them, rapidly and directly. Not civilians and conscripts. Ordinary citizens dying for the sins of their political leaders - that is a crime against humanity.
History warns us to never invade someone else's country. Ethics aside, there is no benefit in it. It always ends badly and leads to decades of toxicity. Just don't do it. If you want to take a country down, just covertly leverage schemes like Brexit and Project 2025 in those countries. They will take themselves down whilst you sit back, eat popcorn and watch.
There have been a number of Ukrainian cyberattacks against Russia during this conflict. They've hijacked television production and distribution, taken down banks' networks, ATMs and card payment systems, defaced and pilfered data from private and government enterprises (including some pretty big data dumps, like the recent publication of bomber-factory data) and messed with Russian electrical, POL and telecommunications systems.
It's a fairly symmetric fight, with the edge, I think, given to Ukraine. Their entire country knows they're in an existential fight. The Russians are trying keep their civilian population from thinking the same way so "business as usual" is in play. That makes them a little softer, IMHO.
History warns us to never invade someone else's country. Ethics aside, there is no benefit in it. It always ends badly and leads to decades of toxicity.
I'm sure the native population of Africa, North & South America and a large part of Asia would agree with you.
Come to think about it, it could also apply to a large part of Europe.
I'm sure the native population of Africa, North & South America and a large part of Asia would agree with you
Palestinians come to mind : why should the native Palestinians give place to European Jews because of Germany's crimes against Humanity ?
Unfortunately we rather screwed things with our history of interventions in other countries. In particular helping to break up Yugoslavia was a really bad move, one of those "win the battle, lose the war" things because it set the precedent that if a segment of a nation's population decided it didn't want to be part of a country then we deemed it OK for them to separate. Since about 40% of Ukraine's population is ethnically Russian.....well, you can see the problem.
As for the cyber attacks, that is a really good point. I can understand stuff being on the public Internet a decade or two ago, back in the Age of Innocence, but its clear that this should never be the case. Unfortunately this conflicts with equipment vendors who would prefer us to be constantly purchasing new software (and hardware to run it on) to counter new threats.
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