August 03, 2022

On the 24th of February, after months of failed diplomacy, war broke out between Ukraine and Russia. While the war was being fought in the physical realm, Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation turned to the digital realm for assistance. Within days of the invasion, a call across underground forums and chatrooms was placed and hundreds of thousands of hacktivist volunteers answered.

Ukraine’s call for help sparked off the first ever global cyberwar which for the first time in history has been waged between two countries simultaneously with a land war. This webinar looks at what we have learned from the cyberwar to date.

For those that would rather read the presentation, we have transcribed it below.

NOTE: Some content has been edited for length and clarity.

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Kathy: Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining today’s webinar, “What a Real Cyberwar Looks Like.” My name is Kathy. Dustin and I will be your hosts for today’s webinar…. and now I’d like to turn it over to our speaker for today, Mark Turnage, our CEO here at DarkOwl, to introduce himself and begin.

Mark: Thank you very much… it’s a lot more fun for me as a presenter to answer questions as we go along, and so I would very much love it if you have questions, put them in the chat and Kathy or Dustin will interrupt me and we can have a conversation instead of a one way webinar.

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We at DarkOwl have covered the Ukraine-Russia conflict extensively since it began in February, and even a little bit before that. Many of you may have seen our posts and our blog covering the war. We thought it would be useful to circle back and give an update and some of our observations on the impact of the war on cyberwarfare theory and practice.

There are just four areas of this webinar that I want to cover today. One is I want to talk a little bit about what the competing theories of cyberwarfare are, because those competing theories inform some of our observations on how the actual war, which is the first war between two nation-states, first extended cyberwar between two nation-states, has unfolded. And then I want to talk about some of the impacts on the internet and on the concept of modern warfare. And then we’ll make some concluding remarks. So, roughly, the slides that I’m going to walk through and hopefully the conversation we’re going to have follows this agenda.

One of the problems with cyberwarfare in general is that it suffers from pretty significant definitional ambiguity, by which I mean, if you talk to people, people have very different views on what cyberwarfare actually is, and if you look at these three overlapping circles, the top being physical disruption, the lower left being misinformation and disinformation, and the lower right being sort of communications disruption and espionage, cyberwarfare actually touches on all three of those.

And so somewhere in the overlap between those three circles are the various definitions of cyberwarfare. And perhaps the best definition that I personally like is the one on the lower left in a cyber school called the Revolutionist: actions by a nation-state to penetrate another nation’s computer or networks for the person’s purpose of causing damage or disruption. Pretty straightforward. It speaks to a variety of degrees. It speaks to each of those three circles. But again, the point here is that there is no one definition of cyberwarfare. We can’t talk about cyberwarfare without understanding some of the complexities and some of the significant differences between cyberwarfare and physical warfare. And so, I want to spend a little bit of time on this slide because I think it’s fairly important as we talk about how the cyberwar between Russia and the Ukraine has unfolded.

One of the key differences between cyber and physical warfare is that geographical proximity is not necessarily launch and maintain an attack. Hypothetically, two countries on opposite sides of the globe could fight a cyberwar between the two of them and it could be quite a fierce war with significant collateral damage, and they wouldn’t be anywhere near each other. Another key difference is that the weapons that are used in cyberwarfare are largely one and done. Once you mount an attack on an electrical grid and it’s understood by the opponent how you’ve mounted that attack, they can patch that vulnerability or they can close that door that you walked through and you will not be able to walk through it again.

And so, one of the key differences here is that you can only use those weapons one time and that actually has an impact on how this particular war has been waged. One of the benefits of a cyberwar is that you can more precisely target cyber weapons. Anyone who’s followed the news can see that when either the party shell the other side and oftentimes civilians are killed because they’re in the neighborhood or they’re in the physical proximity of military weapons and there has been significant loss of life in this warfare. Cyber weapons have the ability to be more precisely targeted. It does not mean that there won’t be a civilian loss of life.

We’re going to talk about some explosions that have occurred in Russian oil and gas facilities that have in fact caused civilian loss of life. But the theory here, and it would appear to be born out by reality, is that civilian loss of life is nowhere near as much as in a physical war. A fourth key difference is that attribution of who did it is a major problem and it has really severe implications for escalation. If you don’t know who it is that has attacked your electrical grid or taken your internet offline and you can’t actually be certain of it, a potential retaliation against your enemy or against the enemy you’re fighting at the time might have an escalatory implication that isn’t deserved. So attribution in non-cyberwar times is difficult… in cyberwar that is even more complex because it has this escalatory component to it.

Private actors can cloud the attribution question. And the question is if a private actor jumps on board, for example, on behalf of the Ukraine and attacks Russia or tax targets in Russia, are they acting on the behalf of the Ukrainian government or are they acting as private actors who may be just hostile to Russia, and vice versa? Same thing for the Russian side. And that really clouds the question of who’s in control of this particular part of the war. So those first five bullet points, I think, are critical components to be considered in any evaluation of what cyberwar looks like and how it could be waged in the future.

There are a couple of other points I want to make which are quite interesting in the context of thinking about a cyberwar between two countries. Several years back we estimated that a nation-state could attain superpower status for less than the cost of an F16 jet on an annual basis, considerably less than the cost of an F16. So, the cost of entry to become a cyber superpower in today’s world are orders of magnitude lower than other types of military expenditures. And we’ll come onto a slide here that talks about who are the superpowers, but there are countries that punch well above their weight because they’ve made that investment in becoming either a superpower or near superpower.

One odd inversion of the international order, the more technologically advanced a country is, the more susceptible it is to a cyberattack. It goes without saying that North Korea, which is not heavily industrialized, not heavily complex from a technological perspective, oddly, is aspiring to cyber superpower status, is probably one of the least susceptible countries in the world to a cyberattack because it’s not connected. The grids are not connected. The level of complexity through the society is very low. On the other hand, both Russia and the United States and the Ukraine are heavily connected societies and are very susceptible to cyberattacks. The point I want to make is that there are some very significant differences between how cyberwar is waged and can be waged and what the implications of that are to how it’s waged, how physical warfare is waged.

I started off by talking about how there are many definitional ambiguities in cyberwar. This is how the popular press thinks about cyberwarfare. If you listen to CNN or Fox News or any of the cable TV stations, this largely captures how people think about a cyberwar; “With a nation in the dark, shivering in the cold, unable to get food at the market or cash at the ATM, with parts of our military suddenly impotent and the original flashpoint that started it all going badly, what will the Commander in Chief do?” (Clarke and Knake, 2012). That is the popular theory of cyberwar that once a cyberwar is launched, people will go back to the Stone Age. And that theory still permeates popular culture.

I want to just talk briefly about some of the competing academic theories of cyberwarfare.

Both of these boxes, the top and the bottom basically parallel each other, and they move from left to right. So on the left of each of the two boxes, the top is sort of a state of the art in 2013, the bottom is state of the art in 2021, and they basically parallel each other on the left. The revolutionists or the alarmists believe that cyberwarfare can change how we fight wars in general. They think it is a fundamental step change in how wars will be fought today and in the future. In the middle are the skeptics or the traditionalists who think it could be significant, but don’t think it will change how international order operates. And on the right, the environmentalists or the realists don’t really believe that it’s going to have a significant effect.

The problem with the competing academic theories of cyberwarfare is that none of these theories, at the time that they were formulated and articles were written about them, could reference a real, sustained cyberwar between two nation-states. These were theories, and they were based on the few historical antecedents prior to 2022. And in each of these historical antecedents… Estonia suffered a sustained multi-month attack by Russia in 2007, during a quick two month war in 2008 between Georgia and Russia, there was a cyberwar rage primarily from Russia to Georgia. China from 2009 onwards had a very significant global espionage effort underway. Iran, 2010, where the United States and Israel attacked the nuclear centrifuge facility in Frodos with the Stuxnet virus. In 2014, the North Koreans attacked Sony. In 2012, Saudi Arabia was attacked by Aramco, was attacked by Iran.

I would define all of these as largely skirmishes. Now, they were relatively limited. In effect, they were not sustained over a long period of time. But there was clear attribution to nation-state actors in each of the cases. The parties involved or the aggressor involved was a nation-state, and attribution was very clear. And in the Ukraine, from 2014 through through 2021, there was simultaneous with the armed conflict in the eastern side of the Ukraine, there were what I would call cyber skirmishes between Russia and the Ukraine. But in none of these cases did we see a sustained cyber hostility between two nation-states for longer than a couple of months. So the theories that I referenced on the prior slide had only these as the antecedents leading up to the current conflict between Russia and the Ukraine.

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Dustin: I’m going to interrupt you there. We’ve had a couple of questions come in. The first one is: “Were all of these state to state attacks?”

Mark: Not all of these were state to state. In the case of the North Korean attack on Sony, that was a state on a private entity in the United States, it’s on the slide because we were able to make attribution to the aggressor, in this case North Korea being a nation-state. There are other examples. For example, it’s widely believed that the Russians hacked the International Anti-Doping Association and doxed a number of athletes in retaliation for Russian athletes. This is in the lead up to the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games. That’s in response to Russian athletes being barred from representing Russia as a state in the Olympic Games. So that was another example of an attack on a private entity. But in all these other cases, these were state to state conflicts.

Dustin: “What impact did the CIA and NSA leaks of tools have on this?”

Mark: We at DarkOwl have written extensively about this. As recently as of three or four years ago, we published a paper on nation-state warfare in the darknet. Just by way of background, both the CIA and the NSA in the last four or five years have suffered significant leaks of their offensive weapons into the darknet and into the public. And our theory in looking at those leaks was that the widespread availability of the tools that were among the best tools that the NSA and the CIA had leveled the field in many respects between nation-states because a relatively small nation-state could go pick up those weapons and start to wage warfare against other countries and it didn’t necessarily elevate them to cyber superpower status. But it did have an effect. We don’t know whether any of these particular cyber skirmishes or cyberwars that took place or battles that took place used those weapons. Most of those I think both the CIA and the NSA leak took place after 2015. So only really the Russia-Ukraine war will probably have seen the use of any of those weapons, if at all.

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I wanted to throw this up because I talked about it just in lead up to our discussion, but the Belfast Center at the Harvard Kennedy School came up with a CyberPower index algorithm which is at the bottom of the page there and they rank the top five global cyberpowers as the US, China, UK, Russia and the Netherlands.

And perhaps there’s no surprise in that listing. The Netherlands are relatively small but a highly sophisticated country and they have made cybersecurity a significant part of their defense structure. I note here honorable mentions and I’ve talked about them before. North Korea, perhaps one of the lesser developed countries in Asia, is certainly a near cyber superpower, Israel, there’s a lot been written about Iran. None of them are particularly large countries. I think Iran’s population is verging on 60 million and is probably the largest, but the fact that they are able to achieve near superpower status is an indication that this is an area that they have significantly focused on.

So let’s talk about the Ukraine-Russia war and some of the observations that we have seen in the lead up to the Ukraine invasion in February, and by invasion I mean the invasion of the Russian troops, physical troops into Ukraine. We saw a significant amount of cyberattacks actually going back into the fall, but in mid-January there were significant cyberattacks against Ukrainian government services, government web-based services, there were a number of false flag operations attempting to implicate Poland in those attacks, which was interesting and we started to see wiper malware deployed in a variety of these attacks there were widespread leaks of Ukrainian citizen data there were a number of DDoS attacks that were mounted across Ukraine – there were a number of attacks on the Ukrainian financial sector.

Perhaps the most interesting thing in the lead up to the actual invasion was that there were six strains of wiper malware that were deployed and what we saw was a transition from traditional sources of attacks to wiper malware in the final weeks before the campaign and again many of these tried to implicate Poland as the source of the attacks but in reality Microsoft has done a pretty good robust study and identified six unique strains of wiper malware that were used and again.

Wiper malware goes onto a computer and wipes it – you don’t have any retrieval capability of the data that is kept on that. There was clearly a significant amount of cyberattacks that were waged in the months leading up to the actual war. We saw on the 24th of February the physical war started, Russia entered from the north, the south and the east into Ukraine and launched missiles at targets in the first 36 hours.

We’re now roughly six months out from the launch of that war so we’re now at a point where we can make some observations about what we have seen and start to make some hypotheses about how this war has been waged. A lot has been written about this but one of the most interesting and unanticipated things that we’ve seen in this war is that literally on day one the Ukrainian government requested help from the activists, the international activist community.

They formed the IT Army of the Ukraine on Telegram and put out a call for activists around the world to join them in attacking Russia from a cyber perspective. And the last time I checked, there were 300,000 or 400,000 followers on the IT Army of the Ukraine. By the way, that channel on Telegram is still very active on a daily and weekly basis. It provides targeting information to the activist community. As recently as yesterday, we saw new targeting information go up, targeting, I believe, Russian Financial targets in Russia. So what the Ukrainians were able to do, which I don’t think anyone anticipated, was suddenly galvanize an army of probably tens of thousands of activists around the world to start to attack Russian targets. And against the backdrop of a Ukrainian cyber armed, uniformed cyber force of probably hundreds or low single digit thousands, suddenly there were tens of thousands of people fighting on behalf of the Ukraine.

Day three of the war, Anonymous launched a campaign to attack Russia and the Belarus. And actually, Anonymous has since been joined by a number of other private actors who have stood up efforts to join the attacks in Russia. And by day five, we started to see a significant amount of data leak into the darknet from Russian targets, both civilian and military targets. In this case, we saw a leak of 60,000 government email addresses. There were immediately attacks on critical infrastructure suppliers: Gasprom, Foreigner, Gas, Mash Oil. A lot of them were hacked. In the first days of the war, it was very difficult as a Russian to get access to any government website and to get access to your bank. We saw tax of Russian state TV military communication leaks. We then started to see leaks of private information of Russian soldiers who were fighting in the Ukrainian battlefield, and they were doxed. And as I mentioned earlier, financial institutions were targeted. We continue to see daily DDoS campaigns. We’ve spoken to a couple of commercial entities in eastern Europe who are effectively offline from a commercial perspective because they’ve turned over their entire network to DDoSing Russian targets. So, you get a sense that overnight this was unanticipated. The Ukrainians were successful at galvanizing the international activist community to fight on their behalf, their offensive cyber capabilities increased by orders of magnitude.

Anonymous messages to Russia

Quickly talking about some of the creative attack methods that were used, GhostSec carried out a printer hack. It turns out that Russian government printers are networked, and within a few weeks at the beginning of the war, GhostSec hacked that printer network and started spewing out inside Russian government facilities propaganda on behalf of the Ukrainians streetlight control systems were hacked. There were a variety of hacks of messaging systems used widely in Russia. We saw electrical vehicle charging stations hacked. We saw, both at the military and the civilian level, short band radio interception and direct trolling. And it turned out that the Russian military was using short band radio in the early stages of the war, and it didn’t take very long for that to be hacked as well. As I mentioned earlier, ATMs were hacked, radio and television channels were hacked. Flights were disrupted, food deliveries were dusted. So these were disruptions that occurred at the civilian level and at the military level in Russia in the early days of the war, but they were they were largely addressed by the Russians within hours.

And by the way, on the other opposite side, the same thing happened in the Ukraine. There were Russian attacks on Ukrainian ISPs, banks, government websites as well. But these don’t rise to the level of that definition that I gave you earlier in the webinar, which is Russia didn’t go dark and cold and stay that way.

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Dustin: “Is the IT Army of Ukraine still active?”

Mark: Yes, it is. And I think I mentioned we actually monitor on a daily basis – it’s found in the darknet database yesterday. When I looked at it, I believe they were putting out targeting information for Russian financial targets. They’re still very active.

Dustin: “What are the long term implications of the IT Army for future cyberwarfare?”

Mark: Oh, that’s a great question. So the Director of the FBI has testified in front of Congress that the implications of something like the IT Army for future cyberwarfare are unknown, but they’re not positive. I think the words he used in his testimony were that if you green light 50,000 civilians around the world to attack another nation-state, it’s well within possibility that they could also attack the United States at some future date. And I think that in a lot of the cyberwarfare, that must have occurred at the federal government, at the military level in the United States, we may have anticipated five or ten or 20,000 Chinese or Russian soldiers cyber warriors attacking us. Once you start to increase that number by orders of magnitude, it changes the equation. So the long term implications are probably alarming and are poorly understood. But clearly, it’s a major issue for any country, by the way, not just the United States, any country that could face the wrath of people who have successfully attacked a nation-state in the past and know that they have the tools to do that.

Dustin: “Obviously, Russia must be monitoring these channels. Are some of these meant as deception or distraction efforts, while more specialized secret targets are addressed by specialized, more capable actors to take advantage of the chaos?”

Mark: Yes and yes. Clearly, Russia’s monitoring these channels, and my guess is, as soon as they see a bank and an IP range targeted, they’re trying to take whatever precautions they can. I don’t think it could be a deception effort by the Ukrainians to distract them from targets that are elsewhere. The reality, though, is that, especially in the context of a DDoS attack, the number of people participating matters. So even if they are deception efforts, they’re working. The actual attacks are working from what we can see. But that’s a great question as well. And I have no doubt, by the way, that the Ukrainians are not publicizing all of the attacks or all of the targets that they’re targeting.

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These are some screenshots of some of the hacks of the electrical systems.

On the left is the EV electrical vehicle charging station, where the actual screen read obscenities about Putin. On the right are hacked ATMs. You’ll see the Ukrainian flag coming across the ATM on the right. One of the really concerning things, obviously, about cyberwarfare in general is the potential to attack critical infrastructure. And we have seen that in this war. We’ve seen a number of vulnerabilities. Exploited water and electricity facilities have been targeted. We haven’t seen a large scale shutdown of water and electrical facilities. They’ve been fairly narrowly time delimited. We have seen attacks on oil and gas refinement distribution centers, particularly near the Russia Ukraine border, and there have been a number of explosions. We don’t have direct attribution that those are caused by cyberattacks. We suspect they are. And in some of those cases, there were civilian casualties. Those have been perhaps the highest profile critical infrastructure attacks that we suspect were carried out by cyber warriors. We’ve seen satellites targeted. By the way, not only have the Russian satellites been targeted, but the Russians also targeted European satellites in the early stages of the war. We saw the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research was shut down for a number of days as a result of a DDoS attack. And then we’ve seen ISPs and other telecommunications providers. So again, we’ve seen these attacks occur.

We have seen some consequences, we suspect, from these attacks. What we have not seen is a sustained shutdown of any of these facilities as a result of these attacks. One of the real surprises for us was the ability of the Ukrainians to galvanize the international activist community and with unknown implications for the future of cyberwarfare. Another interesting and unanticipated consequence of this war has been that the criminals have fallen out with eachother.

Now, in the lead up to the war, we long suspected that many of the ransomware gangs and some of the other bad actors on the darknet were a combination of Russian and Ukrainians working together. And what we have seen since the beginning of the war is a very clear fallout between the Russians and the Ukrainians in the darknet, some of these gangs have split apart. Some of these gangs have clashed with each other. Where gangs had both Ukrainians and Russians in the gang and they split apart. Each side is leaking secrets into the darknet about the other side. And we’ve seen an unprecedented amount of data leaked into the darknet about the ransomware gangs, about their tactics, about the tools that they were using and how they were actually going about what they were doing. I mean, it’s been a treasure trove of information for us and for the industry to give people a sense of how much data has been leaked into the darknet. Both this type of data as well as just leaks as a result of a tax.

DarkOwl has been in existence just under five years. We’ve been collecting data continuously during that time. Since February of this year, the net size of our database and we archive all that data the net size of our database has increased by 20% in six months because so much data has been spilled out into the darknet. Some of these names may not mean anything to you, but these are among the major ransomware gangs leading up to the onset of the war. And what we have seen is that they have stayed split. They are still battling with each other. They’re still spilling eachother’s secrets into the darknet.

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Dustin: “Have any of these attacks resulted in any significant physical damage?”

Mark: The only one that we’re aware of is, and we suspect because we can’t make direct attribution to a specific attack, are some of the explosions that have occurred in oil and gas distribution and refining facilities near the Ukraine Russia border. There doesn’t appear to be a physical reason for those explosions, which leaves cyber. And the Ukrainians, I think, in one or two cases, have taken credit for those explosions and credited their cyberattacks on that as well.

Dustin: “What is your assessment around why we have not seen sustained attacks against critical infrastructure?”

Mark: I’ll come on to that in the next couple of slides. Many of you will know that Belarus was used as a staging ground for the invasion of Ukraine from the north. In other words, Russian troops were in Belarus and moved from Belarus into the Ukraine, which then caused Belarus to become a target for the Ukrainians. And there were a number of attacks as well into the Ukraine. It was difficult, if not impossible, to buy a train ticket, and it severely disrupted the train system in Belarus in the early weeks of the war because such a successful cyberattack occurred. There were a number of attacks against banks, transportation, legal, military contractors. We saw a massive leak of data coming from the largest defense contractor in Belarus. There have been and again in the world, of criminal gangs fighting criminal gangs. GhostSec attacked a group called ghost rider who were aligned with the Russians. And GhostRider has remarkably retaliated with a really sophisticated phishing campaign. And their phishing campaign has targeted civilians in combat zones in the Ukraine with emails that come from Ukrainian government email addresses asking them to leave the area they’re in and congregate because of the war that’s being waged around them, and congregate in areas that have been subsequently been hit by shelling. That’s about as sophisticated phishing campaign as you can imagine. You’re geolocating the recipients, you’re sending them very official looking Ukrainian government emails. You’re sending them those emails at a time when they are hearing shelling or experiencing shelling in their neighborhood, and you’re moving them to areas that are more vulnerable. So that’s where the overlap occurs, between relatively harmless, between warfare that may or may not affect civilians to very directly affecting civilians. And it’s incredibly sophisticated what we’re seeing in terms of that unfolding.

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And I’m going to come on to the question of why we’re not seeing more Russian attacks on critical infrastructure impact the US and western countries and companies in the region. So obviously Russia, the Ukraine, and Belarus are pretty well offline for any normal commercial activity and pretty well likely to be so for the indefinite future. We’ve seen that subsidiary and vendor risk in those countries and in the region, more broadly in the eastern European, risk has become extraordinarily high. And we have seen this among our own client base. We have seen vendors and contractors and subsidiaries for our own clients and their clients directly attacked, directly targeted, and in some cases compromised as a result of this cyberwar. So from an American or a western commercial perspective, you absolutely need to pay attention to any exposure that your organization may have in the region.

And let’s be clear, both Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were all sources of relatively low cost and relatively sophisticated coding and computer science capabilities. And Ukraine in particular had tens of thousands of employees in Silicon Valley and western companies coding and working for them. Some of you may remember that in the early stages of the war, there was a terrible incident where a woman was taking her children and her husband to safety and was killed in a shelling in the street. She was the Marketing Director for a Silicon Valley company living in eastern Ukraine. That’s how close to the vein it is, particularly for the American tech sector. We did see critical infrastructure, as I’ve discussed, severely impaired. And our advice to companies that have any exposure in this region is to make an assessment and be extraordinarily cautious about how you move forward in the region.

This is the part of the answer to the question about attacks on critical systems. So, we have seen Russian attacks on western and Ukrainian critical infrastructure. The Russian attacks on Ukrainian critical infrastructure have largely received less publicity than the actual physical damage done by the war, which is occurring right there. So there hasn’t been a lot of publicity. I think there was some publicity about the fact that the main Ukrainian ISP was taken offline for a number of days by a Russian attack. It was subsequently restored. None of the power grids have gone off for more than a day. So I think those attacks have occurred. We have actually seen attacks on Western targets. The German wind turbine systems were knocked offline, there was a European satellite network that was targeted, we believe, by the Russians, Romanian gas stations were knocked offline. We’ve seen a fair level of increase in Chinese activity supporting Russia in this effort, which was a little bit of a surprise for us. And the FBI has already released indictments against Russian sponsored attacks on nuclear water facilities. We think in many respects, this is not the fullness of what Russia could do.

The retaliation by Russia against US and NATO or US and Western targets has been surprisingly ineffective. And our hypothesis is that there are a number of reasons for that. One is after Estonia and after the battles that we saw in the lead up to this war over the last decade, there has been billions of dollars invested in defensive cyber operations, and that is paid off well in this war. We also think the Russians are largely distracted by the attacks that are taking place against the targets in Russia and they’re preoccupying the cyber warriors. If you’re a Russian cyber warrior today, whether you’re a public or a private actor acting on behalf of the Russian state, right now, your predominant activity on a daily basis is going to be defensive in nature. We also have detected indication that in Russia there is a digital underground that opposes the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. And we’ve seen some targeting from inside Russia of attacks. And then there is a question of whether there is some lack of support in the Russian public. The public polls that we’ve seen indicate large spread support for the war by the Russian public. We don’t have any reason to doubt that. But as the war grinds on, and this is the same in any country, as the war grinds on and casualties mount, support tends to diminish. So I think that’s the answer. We’ve been surprised that the attacks from Russia have not been more sustained, more significant, and more serious, and that’s the best answer that we can come up with.

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Dustin: “According to international law and the Geneva Convention rules, these private citizens attacking other nation-states organized under the Ukrainian government are legitimate military targets. What do you think will be the fallout or implications from this? If Russia has been able to successfully identify any of the members of the Ukrainian IG Army, do you think Russia or Russian aligned countries will try to arrest or conduct strikes on these people while they’re traveling?”

Mark: There’s a lot of good questions in there, and thank you for asking it. I’m not an expert on international law and the Geneva Convention, so I can’t actually address the first question about whether these are legitimate military targets. And my guess is that if Mark Turnage, sitting in Denver, Colorado, were to join the IT Army of the Ukraine and start to participate in attacks on Western on Russian targets somewhere in there, that would be a violation of US law, irrespective of the Geneva Convention or the rules of war. I may be violating US law, not that I don’t think the US is going to necessarily prosecute Mark Turnage for doing so. Certainly possible that they could do that. My guess is Interpol would not honor any international arrest warrant requests. Certainly, again, to use the example of me, if I were to travel to Russia, they could certainly arrest me and charge me with whatever they wanted. I think that one of the unknown implications of this war is the fact that we don’t know how this hacktivist army shapes up in future wars. But my guess is, to the extent that they are individual citizens and not uniform soldiers, they put themselves at some risk by participating in this. And, yes, they could be potentially arrested.

Dustin: “How does a commercial threat intel feed help me protect my organization from rogue IT armies?”

Mark: A lot of different ways. If I’m running a large Fortune 500 companies security and network and I have a robust threat intel feed I’m able to see whether my organization and its IP range is being actively discussed in targeting forums and in hacker networks that are adversarial to either my country or to my organization or these are just commercial ones so I can get a sort of pre warning on the fact that they are targeting my organization. I can get threat intel feeds on the nature of the vulnerabilities that are being used to exploit networks such as mine. So, I can draw a direct link between the software we use to protect our network and any known vulnerabilities of that particular software that are out in the darknet or out elsewhere for sale or being actively used. And for the most sophisticated of those organizations, they’re able to take some proactive steps to avoid attacking. So I would see that a dedicated, robust threat intel feed that encompasses both the darknet and social media is critical to any security posture for a large organization and if nothing else, this war has proven that very robustly.

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Let’s talk about some of the observations so far in this war. As I mentioned, this war is largely not being fought by cyber soldiers but by criminals, mercenaries and activists and non-state actors who are acting at the behest of the warring parties. It’s an unknown, crazy world we’re walking into, to be honest. This was not anticipated by anybody and my guess is that in the war games that we conducted leading up to the Russia Ukraine war, this fact did not feature highly, if at all. As I’ve said, cities aren’t losing their power and water for longer than a few hours. Plenty of companies and government ministries are being taken offline, but again for days, not even weeks and there’s little evidence of sustained serious impact in Russia or the Ukraine. Again, the bulk of the focus in the Ukraine is on the physical damage that’s being done that’s being rotten on the country.

And then in answer to the question that came in earlier, the implications of war being fought by private citizens beyond the control of governments is really poorly understood. And I throw down here a couple of hypothetical questions of what happens is if a ceasefire or a peace treaty is reached between the Ukraine and Russia and the private warriors just carry on, what are the implications of that?

They’re profound, actually and this echoes the FBI director – should nation-states be worried that somewhere we don’t know if it’s 250,000 plus hackers, 50,000 hackers, but tens of thousands of hackers have successfully attacked Russia? At the bottom I put one of my early observations in the actual physical war that has been fought between Russia and the Ukraine there have been a number of deficiencies in the Russian armed forces that have been identified and they’ve been surprising, to be honest. Some of them have to do with supply chain and how the Russian armed forces support its troops in the field. Some of them have to do with the maintenance of Russian military equipment and so on. I’m wondering if there’s a similar deficiency that we’ve seen in the Russian cyber capabilities. Are they simply not the superpower we thought they are? The alternative, the flip side of that coin is they could be holding back. They could have an arsenal of cyber weapons that they’ve not deployed and not used. But it could very well be that to the extent that the Emperor has no clothes on their physical military capabilities, that the same is true in the cybersphere.

Observations on the privatization of warfare – this is another surprise and it doesn’t really address the cyberwarfare capability, the cyber implications. But this is a war where private actors on both sides are playing a significant, major role in the attacks in the war, and I mean both the cyberwar and the physical warfare. So as we’ve talked about, private hackers are waging a war on behalf of Ukraine, Russia. That’s been a real surprise. If not 100% of the military communication by the Ukrainians is done by Starlink. Early in the war the Russians were successfully took offline the Ukrainian military communication system. Within days, Elon Musk and SpaceX had launched satellites over Ukraine. And today the bulk of the communications that the Ukrainian military uses is provided by a private American enterprise. Now let that sink in. That’s a commercial enterprise that is doing that. Some of the best reporting on the war has been by OS analysts, not by US government analysts who have been using commercial satellite imagery that has been widely available since the beginning of the war. The coverage, particularly many of them have posted their analyses on Twitter have been very good.

The Western sanctions that have been imposed on Russia and its allies in connection with this war are being privately enforced by banks and companies. Those are private enforcement capabilities efforts. I would point all of you to bellingcat as a great OSINT source using open source tools that are available on the Russian side. The Wagner Group is heavily involved. It’s a private mercenary enterprise. It’s heavily involved in the war in Eastern Ukraine up to and including flying fighter jets for the Russians. And obviously there’s a fair amount of pressure on companies continuing to do business with Russia.

We have made the observation that private hackers are engaged in this war. It’s not just private hackers. Right through the war on both sides, private actors are playing a very significant role in the waging of this war. What are the implications for the post war darknet? DarkOwl is a darknet intelligence company. We gather data continuously from the darknet and we provide that to our clients around the world as a threat intel feed or as a source of information so we see a lot of this unfolding, particularly in the darknet and what I call a chaotic and often unruly environment in the darknet, just became even more chaotic and risky. When you start to see major criminal gangs in the darknet start to fight each other and leak each other’s information into the darknet. But it’s a golden source of information for us and for our clients. But it’s also just an indication of just how anarchic that capability has become. These criminals will continue to turn on each other, but that’s not going to last forever, and we don’t know how this is ultimately going to shake out. Ransomware has been a big focus of criminal activity in the darknet. We expect that there will be a shift that that will continue to be the case. But we’ll see more wiper malware deployed.

So the consequences, again, for a US Hospital that’s subject to a ransomware attack of not paying a ransom, may be even worse by not paying the ransom if they don’t have a backup and they don’t have other capabilities to restore their network. If the criminals on the other side of that effort choose to deploy wiper malware, you may lose those, particularly if you don’t have backup. You may lose those medical records forever. Again, very sophisticated malware targeting for industrial control systems that we’ve seen.

We’ve seen an increase in awareness about what the darknet is and how it can be used. Propaganda and disinformation – I’ve spent relatively little time in this presentation talking about propaganda and disinformation, primarily because most of those efforts are in social media, not so much in the darknet, although we do see it occurring in the darknet. And as I said earlier, the hacktivist movement has been unleashed.

Here are some unanswered questions and I think some of the questions that we’ve had during the course of this webinar are addressing some of these:

• How do the laws of war apply to cyberwarfare both in the decision to go to war and in the decision to wage the war and how you wage that war? The implications of it are very poorly understood. The attribution error issues, frankly, scared me to death.
• How does one deescalate against cyberattacks that are coming in that you think but don’t know for sure are coming from an adversary? Where’s the safety valve in all of this? In physical warfare? I can see that your planes are coming to attack my targets. I can see that you’re shelling me from behind your lines in cyberwarfare. It’s a far messier calculation and the implications of that are frankly, frightening.
• What are the implications with the appearance of non-state actors on the stage? We don’t know. Will cyber become strategically decisive in a war? It has not been strategically decisive in the Ukraine Russia war, although it’s been a significant factor, but it’s not been strategically decisive. And where is the line between cyber terrorism, cyber criminal activity and cyber hacktivism on the battlefield to be determined going forward.

Thank you very much for joining us today.

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Curious about something you read? Interested in learning more? Contact us to find out how darknet data applies to your use case.

Of the numerous quantitative models that attempt to define and quantify the cybersecurity risk to organizations, very few consider risk indicators from the deep and dark web. Using ransomware as a case study, this presentation reviewed the content that exists on these hidden networks, and explored how data from the dark web can serve as an important data point for more comprehensive risk models. Further, Ramesh Elaiyavalli, CTO of DarkOwl, discussed the unique challenges and considerations that must be made when examining dark web data.

For those that would rather read the presentation, we have transcribed it below.

NOTE: Some content has been edited for length and clarity.

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Kathy: Thank you, everybody, for joining us today for our webinar: Deep and Dark Web Data and Its Impact on Modeling Cybersecurity Risk. My name is Kathy, and I will be the host for today…And now I’d like to turn it over to our speaker today, Ramesh Elaiyavalli, our Chief Technology Officer here at DarkOwl, to introduce himself and to begin.

Ramesh: Alright! Thank you, Kathy. Appreciate the intro. Hi. Hello. My name is Ramesh. I go by Ramesh Elaiyavalli. I’m the Chief Technology Officer and am responsible for product and technology groups to set the strategic technical vision of DarkOwl, as well as kind of the day to day workings and implementation of our platform, our processes and our people. 

So with that, today’s webinar, as Kathy mentioned, is to go over at a high level: what is the darknet and the deep web and how risk modeling is relevant to the current web dates. I will talk a little bit about ransomware as a darknet data multiplier. We’ll also review the security risk frameworks, and some of the stakeholders that need to be engaged as you look at risk modeling and the application of darknet and deep web as it relates to modeling and any future quantification efforts of darknet data.

We believe that the deep web and the darknet data have a significant impact in any type of cybersecurity risk modeling.

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If you look at the dark web in general, think of it as an iceberg where the tip of the iceberg is the surface web, that we all know and use every day. It was originated back in the nineties. It was basically browser based and we all know that a ton of content which is publicly available is available via the surface web, and there are many content or many types of content ranging from discussion boards to pay sites and so on. 

The deep web is anything that is not indexed like Google, simply put, and that is typically behind some type of the authentication of the websites that you require authentication or any type of human intervention. So this is where things like IRCs, telegrams, criminal forums, marketplaces, they all reside in the deep web. And that kind of emerged in the mid-nineties.

[This takes us] all the way to darknet, which was founded as part of the Tor Project in 2006. So this is the intentional anonymizing of networks accessible only by a proxy or a specific peer to peer protocol. So the best example is Tor or called the Onion. And then we have I2p, ZeroNet, Freenet, Oxen, Yggdrasil, so the list goes on and on with a ton of such networks and protocols that only exist in the darknet. And they have become kind of a very important infrastructure for advanced threat intelligence and long defined risk.

When we talk about darknet data, the data is both diverse as well as dispersed all over the internet, The surface web as well as the dark web. So when you look at the diversity of data, data is available as email addresses or email breaches with passwords, which is really the authentication data. There is domain data, subdomains, the IP addresses that are tokens that are common vulnerabilities, exploits and so on. There are source code available. There is content and text available about a company, which is the chatter across the threat actors. There is critical corporate data, contract and financial information, intellectual property, executive insights, as well as employee activity, phone numbers, PII data, banking data and so on and so forth. 

So, as you could see, the data is very diverse. Also, the data is spread and dispersed across various sites that could be transient in nature, there are darknet data places, there are forums that criminals use for discussions, there are image boards or chans, there are blogs on ransomware, there are marketplaces where data is being sold in classifieds, and last but not least, is Telegram and some of the IRC chatrooms.

Given the diversity and the dispersion of data, we also know that the data is really valuable when the data is at scale. And scale matters more so now than ever before. Why is this? Number one, there is a rapid digitization in our society overall. Everything that is paper and tribal knowledge is becoming a digital asset. 

And, with COVID-19, the pandemic has changed the fundamental way in which we work. A lot of the hybrid and work from home exposes organizations to networks that are only as good as the weakest link. So, there is quite a lot of attacks surface that has been exposed with the work from home networks and the garden variety wifi protocols that are out there. 

The third one is [that] the Ukrainian-Russian conflict has significantly shifted the threat landscape. If you think the Ukraine Russia war is far off from you, think again, because a ton of supply chain risk exists today from vendors that you work with and you partner with. And they are directly impacted because of the war or because of the supply chain issues.

And, number four, there is an unprecedented number of never before seen malware and critical zero-day issues in the wild. There is a significant increase in ransomware, ransomware attacks and all of this kind of has fundamentally changed the landscape in which we look at darknet. So it is taken in from a corner of the Internet to now center stage. So the dark web usage has really jumped over 80% in the last three years. 2 million active users, if not more in the Tor browser and the ransomware cost, just the sheer cost is over 20 billion in 2021.

Now, ransomware-as-a-service is a term [increasingly] in vogue. And the threat actors have become very sophisticated in not only attacking and penetrating your organization, but they have the maturity to go after these ransomware-as-a-service providers to make the transaction more professional. You can transact on the internet, on the darknet, and the deep web, where you leverage these initial acts as brokers and third parties wherever they are possible. And the consultants would help in the victim negotiations as well as target the qualification, meaning they would know how big your company is, how much can you pay, and what’s your propensity [to do so]? How badly do you want to be covering your exposures here? So based on that, they offer a service which is the ransomware-as-a-service, and these are paid insider threat partners that criminals and threat actors work with. 

[Lastly], with the Ukraine conflict, like I mentioned, there’s a fluctuation between Ukraine conflict and the various international law enforcement operations. We’ve heard about Conti and Cooming and Stormous data which are available immediately after the invasion. The Happy Blog, for example, returned despite the arrests by the FSB. LockBit, AlphV, Snatch – they all have increased activity. Victim data leaks continue at a very high volume CONTI pretty much disbanded and dispersed into not just one group, but various splinter groups. And such threat actors are directly contacting our stakeholders for pressuring the victims. 

The bottom line is this ransomware as a darknet ecosystem is extremely well-structured. It is operationally very efficient. And the biggest fear is they are running this at scale with ransomware as a service. So this kind of changes the entire threat posture of a lot of companies out there.

And, if you were to be a victim of a ransomware attack… from a customer standpoint, you are completely shut off from your access points. There are messages that prevent you from getting in unless you’re willing to talk to and pay the ransomware and the threat actors.

Ransomware Shame Site on Tor

Now, [let’s talk about] ransomware as a threat signal and overall as a dataflow lifecycle. You start with a pre-cyber incident, and then there is an initial access where that campaign has been launched. There are then incident responses and negotiations as part of the public announcement over to the post cyber incident management and then the whole attack cycle restarts. So, that’s kind of a quick [overview of the] lifecycle of the entire ransomware threat signal and data flow. 

And, 46% of the ransomware victims, unfortunately, have not been compromised once, but multiple times. Over 90% of the data leaks we observed in the last year were attributed in some way or the other to these ransomware actors.

Darknet Ransomware Threat Signal and Data Flow

Now in talking about ransomware, here’s another great example that we tell our customers about: Volvo.

As we all know, Volvo is a very large auto manufacturer. But interestingly, their ransomware attacks did not come from their own compromises, but it came from their supply chain. It started with November 2021, where snatch one of the Chinese Volvo corporations that had a breach. And then it went on to Denso and then it went on to the Volvo Corp update will work to back defense over to StrongCo and so on.

So, various subsidiaries of Volvo, such as the Mack, the Mack defense, the Mack trucks and so on, were exposed as part of this attack. And these impacts we are observing pretty much up and down the entire supply chain. And there are multiple, not just one threat actor, but there are multiple threat actors that are finding ways, finding vectors, finding threat surfaces to expose and bring down some of the largest companies that are out there, either directly or as part of their supply chain and their vendor relationships.

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Now, when you look at the darknet and you look at security risks overall, we talked a little bit about ransomware, but there are other type of threats that you should be worried about. We all know about the phishing attacks and the malspam campaigns, the cyberattacks, all the way from the overt or covert malware, DNS hijacking, data exfiltration, cyber espionage, denial of service attacks, insider threats, and basically any type of information based reputation attacks. So the types of threats have multiple dimensions, and ransomware has kind of bubbled up to the top. However, there are other threats that you need to equally pay attention.

And, what are the consequences of these threats? It is data corruption, it is operational downtime, a huge and a tremendous amount of financial and revenue loss, regulatory issues and fines, damage to your virtual or physical infrastructure issues with your shareholders and society as a whole, and the loss of customer confidence and a significant dent in your brand reputation. The consequences of ignoring these threats are significant and threats continue to evolve and [be a] cost concern for various organizations.

Having said that, how do you do threat modeling is not [the exact same as] how you look at risk modeling. Threat modeling is a subset of what you have to think from an overall risk modeling standpoint. Now, are there standards? [What are] the best practices for risk modeling? The good news is that there are some, but the bad news is there are plenty of them. There is no one single overarching standard for risk modeling. So, depending on your use case, depending on your company, your business, your operations, and your exposure to various security and methodologies, you can adopt one or more of these frameworks for your risk modeling.

The stakeholders for such risk modeling would pretty much be everybody in the organization and beyond. It starts with your SOC, your incident response teams, executives, data protection officers, the governance folks, CISOs, IT leadership.

If you are in Insurtech space, it very much applies if you are a broker, you’re an engineer, you’re an underwriter, you’re a reinsurer. All aspects of insurance underwriting and cyber security assessments need to be worried about risk modeling. It also applies to investors, private equity, and venture capital firms who are looking to fund that startups or to do mergers and acquisitions type activity. So all of those decision makers need to be aware of this, including policy makers, security agencies, military decision makers and so on and so forth.

When it comes to risk modeling stakeholders, it is everybody who has some form of decision making capability and they are doing an assessment, they are underwriting the risk in a way. So the NIST really defines the cyber risk assessments as the ones that are used to identify and estimate and prioritize risk across your organization, your operations, your assets and the people that you have within the organization.

One of the things that we are interested in talking about, [and] is a question we get a lot, is how do you quantify risks? At DarkOwl, we spend a lot of time thinking about it, and we have come up with ways, strategies, and products and score models that would help us objectify and quantify risk at scale. It’s not an absolute risk metric, but we see a very strong correlation and influencers for their risk calculations and your business decisions based on the exposure of data about you and the company that you represent as it relates to the darknet. So we call these “entities” which are basically email credentials, it could be domain names, it could be IP addresses, the set of entities that are easy to take, tokenized, and quantified.

Like I mentioned, this model is not basically the threat modeling aspect, but much more. And, you know, you need to give a lot of considerations for all the external and influential factors, which is the who and the where and the when as it relates to getting your data exposed.

So here’s an example of Microsoft whose overall risk profile, or we call it the darknet score, their score has been trending upwards (pictured below). A lower score is better. So, when your score is going up, that is not a good thing. So it could be either as a result of the amount of leaks that they have or the documents that are being exposed, how much hackishness is in those documents. So risk quantification with scores is a very important way to measure and assess risk.

Microsoft darknet exposure score (DarkOwl Vision)

The next one I want to briefly touch on is an experimental basis. We have Scores 2.0 that we are actively building. We are very excited about these scores to point out where we have used our own data, which is data from our entities, from our e-mail breaches, credentials and so on, and we believe it has predicted 73% of the breaches overall and 100% of all the four ransomware cases that we analyzed in the past. So here’s an example of a company such as Okta, which is the largest security authentication company out there. And interestingly, their exposure on the darknet was partly due to their leaks and some of their breaches. But more importantly, their biggest supply chain vendor is Sitel, which is a call center company which had access to Okta data. And when Sitel got compromised, that bubbled up to Okta. So we we always advise our clients to say, look carefully with your company within your data set, but also make sure that you are monitoring your supply chain vendors. So this is a perfect example.

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How do we see the future of quantifying darknet data? It is very important that a very critical time is right now where we need to see a dialog among multiple organizations on what are the best methods and the best practices for quantifying darknet data and how do you do the risk modeling. We would love to see folks getting rid of questionnaires and checklists and, you know, making decisions based on data that is available in the open net or OSINT data.

We advocate for education on darknet and darknet data and how important it is for overall cybersecurity. There is a clear need we see in establishing a common language and a common set of mathematical models, be it the darknet score, or it could be something else. But, we want to see more such quantified risk models that are available in the industry.

There is a need for better understanding on the relationships between not just the threat actors, but between the personal and corporate risks that every companies go through. And [as we showed earlier] – you got to take a closer look at the type of data that is being leaked by some of the ransomware groups and the threat actors. Some of it is because they may want money, but a lot of it is also, they’re trying to build reputation by leaking data.

[We advise that] you take a close look at what data types are being leaked and what the cohorts and the verticals in the industry are talking about. Also, the key question here is this: how do you measure the goodness or the effectiveness of your current cybersecurity risk model? Ask that question often, ask that question early, and ask that question constantly. Which is, is your risk model effective enough and is it good enough?

With that, if you want to know more about DarkOwl, please talk to us. Get in touch with us at [email protected]. Or you can follow us on various social media and you can also check out, check us on our blog or on our website. And if there are any other questions, I’m happy to address them. That’s the end of the presentation.

Kathy: Thank you, Ramesh. We have had a couple of questions come in. So let’s see if we can get to some of them. The first one we have is” Why do I need DarkOwl? Most of the darknet can be accessed by individuals.

Ramesh: It’s a it’s a great question. Darknet data can be accessed by any individual or any company for that matter, but I would not recommend doing this at home. The reason being that you’re dealing with data that is extremely sensitive in nature and you are potentially interfacing with criminals and threat actors and it is a very dangerous place. So there is very likely challenges that you would run into is you may get attacked yourself when you expose yourself and your network, if you tried to do it without much expertise.

At DarkOwl, we take great lengths to make sure that our access to the darknet and our ways of ethically gathering data is serving you as a customer so that you can access data through our platform and the safety and security that comes with our platform, as opposed to interfacing directly with the threat actors and the criminals. So I would always recommend go through a provider and sort of avoiding direct.

Kathy: Great. Thank you. Another question that came in is: I want to access your data. What is the best way for me to do so?

Ramesh: Okay. The best way to access our data. The short answer is it depends. If the use case is you are a cyber security analyst or you’re looking for a very specific thing. You want to search on the dark web on a limited basis. The best bet would be to leverage our Vision platform. The next step is if you’re a developer and let’s say you want to build an API because you have a platform already built out, or you’re thinking of building a platform or you’re in cybersecurity and insurance business and you want to leverage darknet data for those type of use cases. We would recommend to our API. And by the way, our API, we offer a Search API, we offer Entity API for lookups on email credentials or crypto and so on. We also offer source via API and we offer entities and searches also via API.

So, there’s a variety of APIs that you can leverage, assuming that you want to be building code and develop and integrate dark data into your platform. And then all the way, if you’re a data science person, you are looking at large amounts of data and big data, right? And you have a data science team that is available. We would do what we call DataFeeds, which is snapshots in time that you can have either our entire dataset or filter based on criteria that you provide as well as we can do these historic data dumps and we can take snapshots in time and send it over in a in a secure transmission over to you and your data science team. So it really depends on the use case. The bottom line is you can leverage our Vision UI, platform or you can leverage our API platform or you can consume our big data, be our data feeds.

Kathy: Great. Thank you so much…Ramesh, thank you so much for this insightful presentation to our attendees. If you’re interested in learning more about how darknet data applies to your use case, please feel free to request time with us using the link in the chat. We look forward to seeing you at another one of our webinars in the future. Thank you.

Ramesh: Thank you.

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Curious about something you read? Interested in learning more? Contact us to find out how darknet data applies to your use case.