Shaping the battlefield. Darius, king of Persia, did it in 331bc, with caltrops strewn where he thought his enemy Alexander the Great would advance. The Allies did it in 1944, with dummy aircraft and landing craft intended to fool Germany’s high command into thinking their invasion of France would be in the Pas de Calais, not Normandy. And Russia attempted it on February 24th, when, less than an hour before its tanks started rolling into Ukraine — on their way, they thought, to Kyiv — its computer hackers brought down the satellite communications system run by Viasat, an American firm, on which its opponents were relying.
Victor Zhora, head of Ukraine’s defensive cyber-security agency, said in March that the result was “a really huge loss in communications in the very beginning of war”. A Western former security official reckoned it took “a year or two of really, really serious preparation and effort”.
Why Russia’s cyber-war in Ukraine has been intense, but not always effectiveRead More
