The Russian invasion of its neighbor on February 24 has raised concerns in the West about a surge of cyberattacks on Ukrainian territory and beyond.

Justified fears: the NGO Cyber ​​Peace Institute identified in mid-September a total of 447 occurrences, or twelve per week, carried out by 57 different actors on both sides.

But mass is not everything.

“If there have been major cyberattacks (…) these have clearly failed to produce the strategic effect of shock and amazement that some predicted,” notes Alexis Rapin, from the University of Quebec in Montreal, on The Rubicon website.

Active hackers before the entry of armored vehicles in Russians

And yet.

Even before Russian tanks entered Ukraine, hackers were on a rampage.

In mid-January, the Whispergate malware targeted 70 Ukrainian government sites.

A month later, a DDoS attack saturated sites, radios and banks for several hours.

The day before the invasion, the Hermetic Wiper virus destroyed some 300 computer systems in Ukraine.

Hackers have also targeted the satellite operator Viasat, disabling tens of thousands of modems.

The list is endless of information operations aimed at sabotaging Ukrainian morale.

This overactivity, however, remained under the media radars, focused on the fighting.

“Almost every Russian attack was accompanied by a cyberattack before and during the operation,” says Eviatar Matania, founder of Israel's National Cyber ​​Office.

But "cyber usually doesn't kill people."

“Cyber ​​more important in peacetime than in conventional warfare”

“Remarkable cyber-resilience on the part of Ukraine was a decisive factor,” notes Arnault Barichella, cyber expert for the Jacques Delors Institute, highlighting the assistance of Westerners to Ukraine since 2014 and the annexation of Crimea by Russia.

And he believes that Moscow probably underestimated this cyber resilience of kyiv, just as it underestimated the power of its army and the ability of its people to resist.

Alexis Rapin, for his part, poses the hypothesis that the cyber, on the international scene, "would be essentially confined to sabotage, espionage and subversion and would be deployed in the universe of indirect and clandestine action rather than in in the context of armed conflict".

In fact, the acts of the Kremlin's adversaries did not seem more decisive.

In Belarus, an ally of Moscow, the anti-regime group Cyber ​​Partisans hacked into the country's railway systems to slow the march of Russian troops.

As for the group of hackers “Anonymous”, it claimed in particular to have paralyzed the sites of several Russian media, posting a message summoning to “end” the invasion of Ukraine.

But again, the damage remained inconspicuous or short-lived.

And this relative impotence raises questions that go beyond the framework of Ukraine alone.

"Today, cyber is more important in peacetime than during a conventional war", assures Eviatar Matania, for whom the effects of an attack are generally circumscribed in "one or two days" maximum.

A cyber weapon that blurs the cards between war and peace

“The theory of impotence raises the question of (…) the place of cyber in the economy of forces”, adds Alexis Rapin.

"Having the main advantage of their stealthy and clandestine nature, cyber operations would lose most of their added value in a situation of open war".

Remain what the immaterial universe keeps in the shade.

Outside of open conflict, the cyber weapon blurs the cards between war and peace, between adversary and ally.

It makes the attribution of an attack complex and sometimes remains invisible for a long time.

Even the Stuxnet virus, which struck Iran's nuclear program in 2010, one of the most sophisticated operations in history attributed to the United States and its allies - Israel in the lead - was not identified until after for almost two years.

Caution is therefore required.

Western countries can only rejoice that the cyber contagion of the war in Ukraine has remained limited.

But "we should not underestimate the danger of an escalation, especially if Russian military operations on the ground turn out badly and the Kremlin feels trapped," warns Arnault Barichella.

In June, the American intelligence agency NSA had confirmed cyber operations in favor of Ukraine.

But measuring their effects is a challenge as they are integrated into a whole that constitutes the hybrid war, material as immaterial.

Cyber ​​operations “are tightly integrated into all US military capabilities,” Colin Clarke, research director at the Soufan Center in New York, told AFP.

Often, “they are even part of the preparation of intelligence on the ground”.

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