Sandworm
the Nazis continued to kill en masse, starving 2 million captured Soviet prisoners as they death-marched them westward. In all, 1 in 6 Ukrainians died in the war, and about 1 in 8 Russians, with a staggering total of 26.6 million deaths across the U.S.S.R., a number unparalleled in the history of war.
Andy Greenberg • Sandworm
When Hitler seized Poland in 1939, the region of western Ukraine known as Galicia that had until then been under Polish control suddenly fell to Moscow. Stalin and his Ukrainian Communist Party subordinate Nikita Khrushchev wasted no time in purging the region of anyone who might possibly fight the Soviet Union’s annexation: farmers who resisted co
... See moreAndy Greenberg • Sandworm
Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who lost forty-nine relatives in the next decade’s Holocaust and went on to coin the term “genocide,” later cited the Holodomor in a 1953 speech in New York as a quintessential example of his neologism. “This is not simply a case of mass murder,” Lemkin said. “It is a case of genocide, of destruction, not of
... See moreAndy Greenberg • Sandworm
A zero day, in hacker jargon, is a secret security flaw in software, one that the company who created and maintains the software’s code doesn’t know about. The name comes from the fact that the company has had “zero days” to respond and push out a patch to protect users.
Andy Greenberg • Sandworm
But for anyone watching Russia’s war in Ukraine since it began in early 2014, there were clearer, more direct harbingers. Starting in 2015, waves of vicious cyberattacks had begun to strike Ukraine’s government, media, and transportation. They culminated in the first known blackouts ever caused by hackers, attacks that turned off power for hundreds
... See moreAndy Greenberg • Sandworm
The Nazis rounded up 2.8 million Soviet citizens, more than 2 million of whom where Ukrainian, and shipped them to Germany to work in factories for slave wages.
Andy Greenberg • Sandworm
Lee saw that ICS-CERT statement as practically a cover-up. By questioning BlackEnergy’s role in the attack, or even its existence on the utilities’ network, the DHS was obscuring a key fact: that the hackers who’d planted that malware had used the same tool to target American utilities just a year earlier—that Americans, too, were at risk. “The mes
... See moreAndy Greenberg • Sandworm
In those physics, NotPetya reminds us, distance is no defense. Every barbarian is already at every gate. And the network of entanglements in that ether, which have unified and elevated the world for the past twenty-five years, can, over a few hours on a summer day, bring it to a crashing halt.
Andy Greenberg • Sandworm
Between 800,000 and 1.6 million people were arrested and deported from western Ukraine to labor camps in Kazakhstan and Siberia, as much as a fifth of the region’s population.