November 6, 2026:
Earlier this year, the American port operation in Los Angeles suffered over 120 million Internet-based attacks in one month. American ports and other facilities have been experiencing such attacks and have built defenses to deal with. A consortium of government and private organizations, especially Microsoft, has built a system that regularly handles these attacks and adapts to new types.
For years, Ukraine has been a hotspot for cyberwar. Since Russia invaded in 2022, the Ukrainian Security Service has dealt with over 14,000 Russian CyberWar attacks on Ukrainian government and infrastructure. Russia also has military units that specialize in CyberWar, as well as civilians and gangsters that do it for the money. The Russian government pays them to do it for the Motherland. Ukraine has blocked thousands of these attacks and inflicted far more CyberWar mayhem in Russia. This is nothing new. Two years ago, Ukraine carried out a surprise electronic attack on Russian internet access. They accomplished this using the largest DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack ever. The attack disrupted all major Russian internet systems, including financial institutions, government networks, and internet-based communications. This included messaging apps and social networks.
Attackers usually start with a computer virus, often delivered as an email attachment, that installs a secret Trojan-horse program, letting someone remotely take over the computer and turn it into a zombie for spamming, stealing, monitoring, or DDoS attacks to shut down another site. Millions of zombie PCs exist, and people can rent them to spam or launch DDoS attacks. You can equip a website to resist, or even brush off, a DDoS attack, but the Ukrainian attack was so massive and well planned that Russian DDoS defenses were useless.
It took about three weeks to get the Russian internet back to normal, although some systems were so heavily damaged that it took months to get them running again. Major commercial, government, and military systems were damaged or offline for weeks while repairs were made. The Ukrainian attacks were so massive, hitting internet targets throughout Russia, that there were not enough Russian internet engineers to repair all that damage immediately. Non-critical systems were offline for weeks or months.
Russians fear Ukrainians will launch another such attack before they can repair all the damage from the recent one. Russia has long been a leader in such attacks, but the Ukrainians prepared for that before the Russian 2022 invasion and upgraded their internet defenses. Russia was less prepared and more vulnerable. Some Russian internet engineers warned their government about the vulnerability, but it didn't act.
Simultaneously, the United States continues to hunt down and prosecute Russian hackers who were responsible for cyberwar attacks on Ukraine and its NATO supporters, including the US, just before the Russians invaded in 2022. Five suspects are members of the Russian military and are in Russia. The United States has offered a $60 million reward for those who help arrest the Russian hackers. This is the largest reward the United States has ever offered. These rewards work, and Americans keep quiet about who received an award; the U.S. also often relocates award winners and their families, sometimes placing them in some form of the U.S. witness protection program.
The Russian cyber-attacks on Ukraine were known as Whisper Gate and were carried out by the Russian GRU military intelligence organization. In one form or another, the GRU has existed for 300 years. Espionage and dirty tricks are a long Russian tradition.
James F Dunnigan