Feature Interview: How Sandworm prepared Ukraine for a cyber war

In this joint Risky Business and Geopolitics Decanted feature interview, Patrick Gray and Dmitri Alperovitch talk to Illia Vitiuk, the Head of the Department of Cyber and Information Security of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) about the cyber dimension to Russia’s invasion. From turning off Ukraine’s power grid with a cyber attack in 2015 to the Viasat hack in 2022, Russia’s intelligence services are world renowned for executing creative destructive cyber campaigns. Despite this, after a year and a half of Russia waging war on Ukraine its power grid is up, its telcos are functioning and its banks are still processing transactions. How has Ukraine been able to withstand Russia’s onslaught in the cyber domain? Vitiuk joins us to reveal insights into how Russian intelligence services are operating in Ukraine, and how the SBU is countering them.