Thankfully, the article did clear that up, but the fact that my brain didn't even think, "that's a stupid idea that no one would buy that" is a bit depressing.
BTW, I would have zero interest in that feature.
I wonder if there is any symmetrical response to this happening. How about unleashing psy-ops and "Western trolls" in Runet? Is Europe in purely defensive mode?
We still operate with a primitive homunculi where a gunshot is considered aggressive, but sabotaging infrastructure that can kill hundreds from cold is being waved at.
Which, with the current zeit geist, should really be minimized to almost zero
What stopa the execution of legal system? The claim that we cant know 100% of the facts.
In reality, theres little to dispute with the facts. Theres simply groups of true believers and those who think we need more clarity.
Those two forces alloq the continuation of violations
Why not?? Is Russia's grid infrastructure so old as to not be as vulnerable?
> It "involved an attempt to disrupt communication between generating installations and grid operators across a large area of Poland".
I doubt we will have all details, but I suspect this kind of communication occurred over the Internet (hopefully, at least a VPN).
Also, even completely airgapped networks are not 100% secure, if you can install a device or convince someone to do it by accident (social engineering).
On the bright side, using these weapon grade malware is burning exploits and also showing current state and techniques of Russian cyberwarfare which defender can learn a lot from.
Or perhaps they used an already-known malware to measure defensive capabilities without showing any of their cards.
This is vastly different to real world military systems, where there are a lot more variables and no guarantees - i.e. countries have limited numbers of air defense systems and missiles, the missiles have finite non-zero flight times, the physics of detection systems and sensors are not absolute etc.
The real world is just more complicated, so the value of buzzing someone's airspace reveals a lot more information then "huh, guess they didn't click on that email".
Not that it matter anyway at all... since there aren't any major rivers separating Poland and Ukraine to begin with.
It is totally fair to say that in a digital context, Russia is absolutely at war with Europe.
As far as I can tell, they don’t even try to hide it.
To be specific consider how many lies have been told by the American mainstream media around the narratives of Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Syria, Libya, etc. Israel has the most surveilled and well defended border in the world, the Mossad is sophisticated enough to launch pager attacks to decapitate Hezbollah leadership, yet somehow they got caught with their pants down and Hamas combatants could raid their country for 12 hours without a response. The US also had funded Osama bin Laden in the 1980s, knew Al Qaeda was plotting another attack on the WTC, and the Neocons in the Bush administration wanted a new Pearl Harbor as outlined in the Project for a New American Century.
Russia is not uniquely or even particularly evil here, it's entirely rational for them to not want a major neighbor to join an enemy alliance. Look at how America has treated Cuba for decades. People should stop being so naive.
First link in English I found: https://balticsentinel.eu/8394326/wikipedia-s-baltic-battle-...
[0] https://www.rt.com/news/265399-putin-nato-europe-ukraine-ita...
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ilanbenmeir/that-time-t...
Certainly more successful here than in Ukraine, for what that's worth. I don't think it's a foregone conclusion but they've certainly succeeded here a lot more than in Ukraine.
Eversince notpetya and the colonial pipeline hack, the cyber strategy game changed a lot. Notpetya was genius as a deployment, because they abused the country's tax software deployment pipeline to cripple all (and I mean all, beyond 99%) businesses in one surgical strike.
The same is gonna happen to other tax software providers, because the DATEV AG and similar companies are pretty much the definition of digital incompetence wherever you look.
I could name other takedowns but the list would continue beyond a reasonable comment, especially with vendors like Hercules and Prophete that are now insolvent because they never prioritized cyber security at all, got hacked, didn't have backups, and ran out of money due to production plant costs.
I'm not sure whether Johnson or Nixon (during periods of sobriety of course) were considering directly attacking Russian territory because of that...
That was in local news this weekend. I know about it because I'm responsible for another city heating network, we take security pretty seriously. All devices are in vpn and if someone outside needs to login remotely, he is granted access only for the time needed, so window for actually worming the network through vendors is very small. All staff accessing the system has computer security training. But not every heat provider operates like this, some small ones (like the one affected) are a little more sloppy.
But thanks for proving the point about Russia's disinformation war.
Regardless, Russia is a bully and sticking your head in the sand won't make them go away.
This was a G. W. Bush idea, during his last year in office, and it was never going to actually happen.
At the dinner on Wednesday, the German and French position was supported by Italy, Hungary and the Benelux countries, a senior German official said. Mr. Bush was said to have accepted that his position was not going to prevail,
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/world/europe/03nato.html
> Was the EU and the USA friendly towards Russia ...
When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, did Angela Merkel stop the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, as very sensibly demanded by much of Eastern Europe? No, of course not - if we just trade more with Russia, they will be interested in peace! Germany deservedly lost billions finishing the construction, and it never transmitted a single ccm of gas.
> You know the result of that, but still consider there was no provocation at all
I think a better question to ask is, why do countries that border on Russia try so hard to become NATO members?
That announcement is still on NATOs website to this day. To think it would never happen can only be seen as wishful thinking.
> try so hard to become NATO members?
If your intention is to align with the EU, it makes sense you want military protection against invasion in the future. Even Russia wanted at one point to join. The question is really why Russia should sit quietly while several countries around it join an alliance against it? Would the US be ok with Mexico and Canada doing that? Sounded ridiculous until a few months ago, now that is a sensible thing for them to seek. Look at how the US reacted to just a EV deal Canada made with China.
It threatens mobsters racket profits, but it will not start any actual fight.
You insert subtle hints of USSR/Russia being benevolent or good. (“Left without blood”, “victorious at enormous cost”)
This context is not real. There was blood since ww2. And major part of that ww2 cost you mentioned, was actually paid by Ukraine itself.
Countries joining NATO, did so not because they want to conquer Russia. (Are you proposing that Estonia wants to conquer Russia?)
Up until recently, European defence budgets were laughable. If decisions would be done based on actual risk analysis, it would be clear that NATO was not threatning to attack.
> Even if you were right , is the risk you may be wrong acceptable when it comes to your national security?
Yes, for Russia it will always be beneficial that all its neighbours are weak puppet states.
I concede all events in history (incl. Ukraine invitation) do lead us to this moment. But this is a bit of nitpicking, everybody see who is the psycho and everybody must deal with it.
It’s not a secret that Ukraine is vital for the ground defence of Russia, but the Ukrainian people are pro-EU, and not from propaganda. You might well remember that their government was essentially a puppet for Russia until they were ousted. So if Ukraine is radicalised it is odd to think that its because of European propaganda- more likely they got tired of their masters.
I fully accept that Putin thinks of NATO as a threat to Russia, and NATO is at the door.
Its also entirely true that the border countries (Estonia for example) have major anxiety regarding a Russian invasion, and actively seek NATO membership to avoid that.
However, flying aircraft into sovereign territory (as Russia often did and continues to do to Sweden) is not the behaviour of a threatened country, they are the ones making the threats, constantly testing.
Their expansions into territory under the guise of “going where there are native Russians” will necessarily conclude with border regions being even more hostile to any native Russians wanting to settle. Again, in Estonia, the city of Narva is almost entirely native Russian; but they don’t want to be under Putin. Putins actions make Estonians wary of this fact and makes the Estonian government wish to integrate these people more instead of letting them live their lives.
In the Ukraine this was true too, thats why there was such a push to get people speaking Ukrainian, but Putin saw that his claim to the territory gets weaker over time and decided to invade.
If you understand the incentives of all involved, it is plain to see that Putin is the architect of his own misery here.
Now, Greenland, as an example, would be wise to seek protection from the US, if we use the same logic, since it’s clearly being threatened, more clearly than the Baltic countries ever were by Russia since they joined NATO , at least. Imagine how the US would react if China was asked to help! Now, imagine Greenland actually had ties to the US going back several hundred years and a large population of “ethnic” Americans (bear with me). Would the US quietly sit while China initiated the process of establishing military presence in Greenland, at Greenlanders own request? Do you think they should, even if the current administration obviously wouldn’t entertain that for a second? Quite honestly, I think it would be foolish for the Americans to allow a sovereign nation near its borders to do something like that , and the Bay of Pigs conundrum shows that the US is not dumb and this will simply never happen. Now, the situation between Ukraine and Russia is not exactly the same , but if anything the incentive Russia has to prevent NATO there is even stronger than in the imaginary scenario I outlined above, I think that is as clear as anything can be in geopolitics.
It is the right of any sovereign country to freely join any military alliance, including NATO. The fact that this upsets Putin says more about him than the alliance and its (potential) members.
Russia is threatening a direct military invasion to present-day and potential future NATO and EU members. When has the EU done the same to any of your listed countries/territories? When have the US said they will invade a country for simply allying with Russia or the BRICS?
"Let me return to NATO enlargement. .... Russia is European and multi-ethnic. I can imagine us becoming allies. Only dire need could make us allied with others. Bit we feel left out of NATO. IF Russia is not part of this of course it feels left out. Why is NATO enlargement needed? In 1954 Russia applied to join NATO. I have the document. [ Bush: "that's interesting" ] NATO gave a negative answer with four specific reasons. Lack of an Austrian settlement. The totalitarian grip on Eastern Europe. And the need for Russia to cooperate with the UN disarmament process. Now all these conditions have been met.Perhaps Russia could be an ally."
To be fair in 1938 Britain hardly had a land army so France would have had to do all the fighting anyway. So whatever Chamberlain wanted to do didn't really matter that much.
Imagine the power grid fails in an entire city for 48 hours. How many apartments or shops have backup power for 48 hours? What about hospitals or cellphone towers or traffic lights?
How long before someone cannot make a 911 call or hits another car at night or dies in intensive care because the machines don’t work anymore? What about all the food in a refrigerator, or CCTV cameras, or POS payments or a thousand other things? And if sometimes physically fails, how long before a technician (who was himself relying on that power grid) is able to reach the place, carrying whatever spare part they have, and fix the thing?
Or, take a dam. I’m no dam expert, but how long does it take before a flood happens? And when water starts flooding the streets, how long before people can’t get out of their homes, cars are swept away, and so on? How long before standing water starts carrying diseases?
If they succeed they may well not be reversible. The question is if this had succeeded would we have shrugged it off again or responded appropriately?
Stuxnet destroyed centrifuges. It does not seem impossible that a sophisticated attack could shred some critical equipment. During the Texas 2021 outage -they were incredibly close to losing the entire grid and being in a blackstart scenario. Estimates were that it could take weeks to bring back power - all this without any physical equipment destroyed or malicious code within the network.
Edit: Had to look it up, the Texas outage was "only" two weeks and scattershot in where it hit. The death toll is estimated at 246-702.
Yes, there is the risk of cascading failures, some industrial processes are very hard to re-start once interrupted (or even impossible) and the lead time on 'some transformers' can be a year or more. These are nothing like the kind that you can buy at the corner hardware store. A couple of hundred tons or so for the really large ones.
Grid infra is quite expensive, hard to replace and has very long lead times.
The very worst you could do is induce oscillations.
Bloomberg had a decent article[0] about transformers and their lead time. They're currently a bottleneck on building. It wasn't paywalled for me.
"The Covid-19 pandemic strained many supply chains, and most have recovered by now. The supply chain for transformers started experiencing troubles earlier — and it’s only worsened since. Instead of taking a few months to a year, the lead time for large transformer delivery is now three to five years. " [0]
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-bottlenecks-transfor...
Vietnam too.
The counter-strategies that the British used to defend against German strikes included "switch off all the lights at night so they don't know where they are" and "order newspapers to lie about which part of the city was damaged in order that spies reading British newspapers and reporting back to HQ said missiles fell short/went too far, causing HQ to incorrectly compensate on the next strike". I don't know if the reverse was true, despite now living in Berlin.
Everyone's supply chains were also much shallower, and equipment much cruder and therefore easier to make (though also less efficient). Half of London or Berlin losing electricity makes a much smaller difference when far less was electrified in the first place, e.g. loss of electricity for a heat pump doesn't matter so much when the terraces and apartment blocks have internal fireplaces and regular coal deliveries.
Also re Vietnam, it took until 1997 to return to the per-person energy use it had in 1970: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/vietnam
And until 1993 to reach the not-adjusted-for-population level.
And the electricity graphs don't even go back far enough to see what that war was like, that's all energy.
If you succeed in attacking the grid, you achieve the same widespread industry impact, without the cost of the munitions.
It can take decades to recover from a cyber attack like this, if it succeeds.
These attacks are widespread, damaging, and the repercussions are felt for decades in their wake. We _are_ being carpet bombed, and the costs for the victims are ongoing and growing. The collateral damage is everywhere.
Do you really think there's no impact?
> Cyber units from at least one nation state routinely try to explore and exploit Australia’s critical infrastructure networks, almost certainly mapping systems so they can lay down malware or maintain access in the future.
> We recently discovered one of those units targeting critical networks in the United States. ASIO worked closely with our American counterpart to evict the hackers and shut down their global accesses, including nodes here in Australia.
> https://www.intelligence.gov.au/news/asio-annual-threat-asse...
But one last try.
You suggested that the cost of cyberattacks on industry, is not so great as when we were destroying it with bombs instead.
However, every time we have power outages, people die. Then we have the cost of securing the infrastructure. And the cost of everyone else affected, who has to increase their resilience.
Your bank is collateral damage, as is the people freezing to death in their homes. Entire industries are on the verge of collapse - getting a new turbine to help stabilise your grid has a lead time of _years_, not days or weeks. And if you hit weeks, people die.
Insurance responds to attacks, and that trickles out to everywhere that is touched. VISA and MasterCard have to prepare for eventualities, because of attacks not aimed at them, but at power infrastructure.
When power is hit... There is nothing unaffected.
Volt Typhoon hit the US power grid, and required a massive multinational effort to extract them, that took almost a year... And VT wasn't intended to do damage, just look for weak spots. So that next time, they can cause damage. As part of that survival process, various hardware partners were kicked to the curb, and the repercussions are still in the process of being felt. Half the industry may have issues surviving because of it.
Industroyer is one of the reasons that Kyiv got as bad as it did. Malware is not some hand-wave and fix thing. Half the city's relays were permanently damaged.
Then of course, there was Stuxnet. Which blew up centrifuges, and the research centres hit are still trying to recover from where they were, then.
Cyberattacks are a weapon of war, people die, industries die, and there is no easy path to recovery following it.
An entire industry exists, just to defend against these kinds of attacks. The money spent on that, is counted, which means it has to be less than the cost of the attack succeeding. Trillions are spent, because there is absolute weight behind surviving these attacks.
If things were easier, it'd be an industry solely focused on backups and flipping a switch. But it's not.
It seems as if the European war has been pushed to the background recently, and most people kind of forgot about it. If you walk down the streets of Paris or Berlin does it look like it’s wartime, do people talk about it much, do they share the latest front news and so on?
Like what exactly would you want them to do? Run around screaming all day because there's a war in another country 2000 km away from them?
No, people just go on with their lives, doing their jobs, taking care of family and friends, paying their taxes, so that specialized workers in the ministry of defence can take care of the war stuff for them. That's how modern society works.
It's even similar in Kiev, when you walk down the streets you see people living their lives. Gyms, bars, cafes, clubs are full and lively. People don't stop living and enjoying their daily lives just because there's shelling somewhere else in the country.
While it's true to a certain degree, you make it sound like Kyiv residents are having a grand old time right now. But in reality, the majority are trying very hard to keep from freezing to death as Russian attacks targeting their power and heating infrastructure have destroyed much of it.
I am not. You choose to interpret it that way.
> Like what exactly would you want them to do? Run around screaming all day
And I didn’t suggest they should “do something or other” I was wondering what the situation was since I am not there in person and figured enough HNers might be.
And "enjoying their daily lives" diminishes real tragedies of Ukrainians' daily lives.
I agree. However if we talk about Kyiv, I'd like to remind you that electricity is available 2-4 hours per day, in some regions there has been no water nor heating for the last week. Everyone I know are extremely stressed, and if anyone visits their gym, it's not to enjoy life, but to not slip into total despair.
There's also occasional anti-NATO "stop the war" marches, and some longer-duration pro-Ukraine vigils above the Brandenburger Tor U-Bahn station.
[0] at least recently
Next is Moldova.
Then Latvia and Lithuania.
Then Estonia and Northern Finland/Norway.
Then Romania and Bulgaria.
Putin has already said many times that he intends to rebuild the Russian empire to its zenith.
If someone makes tanks with paper for armour, because it cuts costs, they are to blame if those tanks catch fire.
It's fine to have this view that software should be defect free and hardened against sophisticated nation-state attackers, but it stretches the meaning of "defect" to me. A defect would be serving to fulfill that utility it had been designed for, not succumbing to malicious attackers.
because this is the kind of stuff infrastructure things do, along with MANY other things. Im sure not all infrastructure does it, but plenty do.
This is not hardening, its BASIC security. any scriptkiddie from same country could find it and cause problems.
How far would you say they should go to stop domestic script kiddies from messing with it? and if script kiddies from other countries mess with it, is it now cyber warfare?
I’ll therefore decline to comment on your assertions. I will acknowledge it’s time to consider Russian interference as expected if you are designing an internet connected system, fine, but it looks like it’s non trivial to fatally compromise these systems already.
so lets turn this logic around on those megacorps that leaks personal data, suppose they run an open postgres or mongodb with ALL the customer data, no password or default password, on the open ipv6, is it victimblaming to go after them for this? after all, its the big bad criminals that stole the data?
the truth of the matter is that yes, the ones that take the data are criminals, but so are the one that doesnt take proper pracautions.
Have you actually seen how these infrastructure things operate? many of them have open scada systems directly coupled to the internet. Many of them have sms gateways that just accepts messages from _ANY_ phone number to issue shutdowns.
I know because I have been brought in to look at some of those things as a consultant
Naaa, better continue to have Germany and France continue to destroy the Union by looking only at their self interests while they pretend to talk tough on Trump and sabotage any real internal changes so that they can keep their crumbs.
Just this week, France’s meddling halted a deal that was 30 years in the making: Mercosul while their president, in all his virtue signaling went on Davos to pretend to have the moral upper hand on the USA.
We’re a union of hypocrites. And France and Germany are the worst of them.
Any actual EU members are in principle protected by this, even if they aren't NATO members. Whether or not EU countries being in NATO diminishes their ability to act without US consent is debatable and I lean towards saying NATO's joint command essentially sets article 42 cooperation up to fail.
That's the difference between Ukraine and the other countries on Putin's list though: Ukraine wasn't in the EU or NATO, and for all intents and purposes had no allies.
Mercosur would actually be Polish complaint to the EU Court of Justice (CJEU)
https://www.visahq.com/news/2026-01-22/pl/polish-meps-spearh...
Potential damage: "Most notable was one [attack] in Ukraine in December 2015. It left roughly 230,000 people without electricity for about six hours during one of the coldest months of the year."