{"id":1458,"date":"2016-12-23T01:00:29","date_gmt":"2016-12-23T01:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/dcss\/?p=1458"},"modified":"2016-12-23T01:00:29","modified_gmt":"2016-12-23T01:00:29","slug":"ukrainian-power-company-99-certain-blackout-result-of-cyber-attack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/dcss\/2016\/12\/23\/ukrainian-power-company-99-certain-blackout-result-of-cyber-attack\/","title":{"rendered":"UKRAINIAN POWER COMPANY \u201c99% CERTAIN\u201d BLACKOUT RESULT OF CYBER ATTACK"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"power-grid\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Sourced : Defence One<\/p>\n

By Patrick Tucker<\/p>\n

As Russia seizes the stage, the lights are going out in Ukraine. On Sunday morning around midnight a major blackout struck the power substation in Novi Petrivtsi, a village near Kiev, disrupting power to between 100,000 and 200,000 people. Vsevolod Kovalchuk, acting director of Ukrenergo power company, said that the company was able to get the service restored relatively easily, within an hour and fifteen minutes. He told Defense One he was \u201c99 percent\u201d certain a deliberate attack caused the blackout.<\/p>\n

Sunday night\u2019s power outage\u00a0 echoes one that occurred roughly a year ago, affecting more than 225,000 people Ukraine. A shadowy Pro-Russian group called Sandworm emerged as the most likely culprit.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn December 18, 2016, a transmission substation serving the Ukrainian capital de-energized, leaving roughly one-fifth of Kiev without power. Official company communication listed \u2018hacking\u2019 and \u2018equipment failure\u2019 as possible causes. While details are still sparse, the improbability of the simultaneous loss of three transmission lines lead us to assess with low confidence that a cyber attack was the root cause,\u201d said FireEye\u2019s Sean McBride, who added, \u201cNevertheless, we note significant dissimilarities between this and the 2015 outages.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ukrenergo has not named the latest attacker. But the event coincides with renewed violence\u00a0 in Eastern Ukraine.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the last couple of days, there\u2019s been a deterioration on the ground with the rising numbers of ceasefire violations, mostly initiated by the separatists and the Russians who control them. It\u2019s a subject that has to be kept under continuing review,\u201d Amb. Alexander \u201cSandy\u201d Vershbow, who retired in October as\u00a0 deputy secretary general of NATO, said in briefing with reporters in Washington on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

\u201cTwo years since the first Minsk agreements we still haven\u2019t seen Russia implementing the very first parts of its obligations, which is a ceasefire and the durable, irreversible withdrawal of the heavy weapons,\u201d said Vershbow, citing open source information and classified intelligence showing that Russia continues to provide fighters with advanced technology and armaments.<\/p>\n

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko recently told CNN that Russia has outfitted the pro-Russian fighters with more than 700 tanks, on top of 1200 armored personnel carriers, 1000 artillery systems.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese little gangster states have more tanks than most NATO allies including the latest model Russian tanks which were not stolen from Ukrainian storehouses. They do not exist in the Ukrainian inventory,\u201d said Vershbow.<\/p>\n

Ukraine, too, operates a large weapons arsenal compared to other European states, including 2,800 tanks (France has just 423) and 625 multiple rocket systems. Of course, the primary difference is that the pro-Russian forces have a happy willing supplier in Russia.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight now there has been a severe uptick in fighting near Svitlodarsk, but it would be a mistake to say that the war in 2014 is the same as the war in 2016, due to a decrease in direct Russian involvement,\u201d said Aric Toller, a researcher at the open source intelligence group Bellingcat. Toller has been keeping eyes on the situation.<\/p>\n

For a sense of how history could repeat itself look back to the summer of 2014, a period that Vershbow calls the darkest moments of the conflict. Ukrainian forces were succeeding in pushing pro-Russian forces back. Putin responded with a massive surge in forces. \u201cThat was the battle of Ilovaysk which saw huge Ukraine\u2019s casualties,\u201d said Vershbow.<\/p>\n

The same thing happened in the summer of 2015 with the battle of Debaltseve. There, too \u201cmassive Russian involvement turned the tide,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

All of that provided support to those in Washington looking to provide military aid, particularly anti-tank weapons, to the Ukrainians. \u201cThere was a strong moral and political case that if the United States was not prepared to defend the Ukrainians directly that they should give them more means to defend themselves,\u201d said Vershbow.<\/p>\n

The most recent National Defense Authorization Act provides nearly $500 million in aid to Ukraine, including lethal assistance. But Washington analysts long have said that amount likely won\u2019t be enough to change the balance of power on the ground.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a fact of life that Russia can always out-escalate Ukraine,\u201d said Vershbow.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact that the frontlines are where they are is a direct consequence of the massive artillery attacks from Russia in the summer of 2014,\u201d said Toller of Bellingcat. On Wednesday, Bellingcat released a major report painstakingly documenting those attacks against Ukranian targets, the campaign that helped push the situation to where it is today.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe [Russians] are, of course, maintaining the pretense of a civil war. This report shows that Russia\u2019s insistence of not being a direct party to the conflict \u2014 an assumption that was \u2018baked into\u2019 Minsk II \u2014 is a complete falsehood. We should not treat this as a civil war, and instead see these attacks from 2014 as acts of war staged from Russia on Ukraine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sourced : Defence One By Patrick Tucker As Russia seizes the stage, the lights are going out in Ukraine. On Sunday morning around midnight a major blackout struck the power substation in Novi Petrivtsi, a village near Kiev, disrupting power to between 100,000 and 200,000 people. Vsevolod Kovalchuk, acting director of Ukrenergo power company, said… Continue reading UKRAINIAN POWER COMPANY \u201c99% CERTAIN\u201d BLACKOUT RESULT OF CYBER ATTACK<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1459,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[1157,27,180],"class_list":["post-1458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-conflict","tag-kiev","tag-russia","tag-ukraine","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/dcss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/dcss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/dcss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/dcss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/dcss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1458"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/dcss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1460,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/dcss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458\/revisions\/1460"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/dcss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/dcss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/dcss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/dcss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}