Ukraine’s great cyber heist

For more than a decade, Moscow honed a shadow playbook — blending disinformation, ransomware, supply-chain sabotage, and quiet cyber theft to steal technology and weaken its rivals. That model once gave the Kremlin an edge. But today, in a striking reversal, Kyiv is flipping the script.

In the past year, Ukrainian state and proxy cyber actors have shifted from primarily defensive disruption to strategic intelligence collection. They have breached Russian military networks, leaked operational files on high-end platforms, and even broadcast battlefield realities inside Russia itself.

The result is a palpable asymmetric inversion: Russian tools of statecraft are being used against Moscow, stripping the Kremlin of secrecy and, crucially, generating intelligence that informs Western militaries and policymakers about vulnerabilities in Russia’s most sensitive capabilities.

Read more at The Cipher Brief