“All eyes are on Moscow”, estimated Friday January 13 on franceinfo Julien Nocetti, professor at the Academy of Saint-Cyr Coëtquidan and researcher at the center of geopolitics of the datasphere, while many Ukrainian institutions have been affected since this Friday by a cyberattack. “Westerners will have all the trouble in the world assigning responsibility”, he nuances.
franceinfo: It’s hard to prove, but all eyes are turning to Russia?
Julien Nocetti: Indeed, it’s hard to prove because already, on a technical level, you have to be able to trace the traces left by the attackers, therefore hackers. This is a process that can take time. Above all, the attribution that can be made in the next few hours stems above all from a political logic. Ukrainian, European or American political leaders must have an interest in attributing this action, perhaps here to Russia. It is true that all eyes are on Moscow. It has to be diplomatically and strategically consistent with their interests, and that’s complicated because we’re at a time when there’s a military escalation with Russia, because of the Russian troops massed along the Ukrainian border. This whole situation is potentially likely to inflame the tensions that we already know.
The question one might ask is: who else but Russia could do that?
This is where you have to classify nuances in this complicated landscape where you never know, basically, if you are dealing with the Russian government, or with Russian authorities in services, or with cybercriminal groups that have indirect links with the Russian government, or simply act on their own. And that is really the most sensitive parameter. In fact, in this type of operation, Western intelligence services will have a hard time unraveling all the links that may exist between these Russian actors. This is something that is also found in the more traditional cybercriminal landscape, where very often Westerners will have great difficulty in assigning responsibility.
Do you think this is an intimidation operation or can we imagine that the hackers really get something?
If we place possible responsibilities on Russia, it should be well known that the Russian objective is rarely only technical. It is above all a question of having an effect on perceptions, of intimidating the Ukrainian authorities, even the population, of showing them that the country is poorly protected and insufficiently defended in terms of cyber infrastructures.
If we are still taking tweezers about a possible Russian responsibility, can we say that there has been a rise in power of Russia in this regard in recent years?
It is indeed a real strategy which, in my opinion, was quite underestimated by Europeans and Americans before the American election of 2016, when we became aware of the entire cyber defense and information warfare apparatus in Russia. . What has happened for 5-6 years is really a rise in power of Russia with a bet that is made on the exploitation of the weaknesses of our Western societies, both ultra-connected and very dependent on the media . This is something that is well understood, well measured on the Russian side.