Ukraine is not only being overrun by Russian tanks.

Moscow has also been launching violent attacks on the country's IT infrastructure for weeks.

The severity of the cyber attacks on the computers, data storage and technical systems of banks, energy and water suppliers, ministries and organizations in the country had increased rapidly at the end of last year.

In mid-January it reached a temporary peak.

Now they are escalating.

In the process, IT specialists have come across a new variant of a fatal software weapon – and it could have repercussions far beyond the Ukraine: Hermetic Wiper.

It can erase all data on a computer's hard drive.

Bastian Benrath

Editor in Business.

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Stephen Finsterbusch

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Thiemo Heeg

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Microsoft engineers discovered the malware in the IT structures of Ukrainian organizations six weeks ago.

Since then, specialists around the world have been on the alert.

Because the malware is very aggressive and very efficient.

The potential damage to the global IT system cannot be foreseen.

Hermetic Wiper is like a digital precision weapon, says Lavi Lazarovitz, an analyst at data specialist Cyber-Ark.

It can be used to attack and disable almost any network.

"The software may be small, but its damage potential is huge."

First strike in cyberspace

Since the program has neither a built-in brake nor time limits, it can spread quickly and globally via the Internet.

At first glance, it looks like a simple digital blackmail program, a so-called ransomware.

At second glance, however, it turns out to be a digital weapon that wipes out all the data on an infected system, explain the security specialists from the IT houses Symantec , Eset , Cyber-Ark Lab and Sentinel Labs independently of one another.

After such a blow, every computer is dead and no longer closed

Hitesh Sheth, founder and CEO of California IT security company Vectra AI, says: “The war we see on TV is only a fraction of the conflict.

Cyber ​​weapons inflict at least as much damage on Ukrainian computer networks, especially the financial and military systems.” There is probably no clearer evidence that offensive cyber actions are a first-strike tactic – and it affects everyone: governments, the army, companies, millions of people.

With its digital arsenal of weapons, Russia has been causing violent conflicts for a decade and a half.

In 2007 it targeted the IT systems of Estonia, in 2008 those of Georgia, in 2015 Russian hackers attacked the German Bundestag, in 2016 they tried to manipulate the elections in the United States, in 2017 those in France.

At the time, at a security conference in Moscow, the Kremlin had its cyber officials declare that they were working on an Information Age strategy that would be tantamount to nuclear deterrence.

The so-called “first strike capability” of the nuclear powers was crucial for the Cold War enemy blocs to balance the nuclear terror.

As the war in Ukraine shows, a lot has changed since then, but some things have stayed the same.

Because the first strike is now not being carried out with atomic weapons, but with digital weapons such as the wiper programs.

Ten days before the first regular Russian troops crossed the Ukrainian border, Russia launched cyber attacks on the neighboring country.

Observers from IT security company Palo Alto Networks documented that from February 15, the Russians began systematically overloading the websites of Ukraine's foreign and defense ministries, the armed forces, Ukrainian radio and two major banks in order to crash them .