The Battle for Your Computer

CHAPTER 1The New Gold—Cybersecurity 101

December 23, 2015, was just another typical winter's day in the Ivano‐Frankivsk Oblast of western Ukraine. It was late afternoon, near the end of a normal working day at the Prykarpattyaoblenergo power station, which supplies electricity to local residents. One of the maintenance workers took a quick glance at a screen, and for a moment, it looked like a ghost had taken over his computer: the cursor started moving around by itself, and windows started popping open without anyone touching the computer or the keyboard.¹

It was immediately clear that the mouse wasn't just glitching: someone was moving it on purpose. The cursor started clicking on the programs that controlled the electric circuit breakers and opened them, to interrupt the flow of electricity. The consequences were clear: for every circuit breaker that was opened, thousands of people lost power at home, at the height of winter. The maintenance worker threw himself at the computer, trying to seize control of the cursor—but it was no use. The computer didn't respond. And then suddenly, the computer was locked and the password was changed, so that he could not log in at all. In the end, the electricity supply was cut off at around 30 substations, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were left without power.

For six dark, frozen hours, the electricity company's technicians labored to get electricity flowing to people's homes again. In normal circumstances, they would have been ...