On The Front Lines Of Putin's Digital War With Ukraine

Summary

February 15 2022: Article discusses the Digital Warfare, Hybrid Warfare and Propaganda aspects of the current conflict in Ukraine between government forces and rebels backed by Russia.

In particular, there's a lot of discussion about how the Russians are using the Ukranian's cellphones against them.

Source

Bibliography

1. Original article at Politico

Game and Story Use

• Relevant to a game set in the possibly-upcoming Russian invasion
  • or anywhere that an insurgency or civil war sees one side aided by a powerful and technologically-savvy ally.
  • If you were trying to bring a Twilight 2000 campaign into the modern day, this article would be a wealth of ideas for that as well.
  • Add to any war from now onwards - this might well be a good way to explain some of the sub-modern internet concepts in your Cyberpunk RPG of choice: the millennium was peak interwebz … after that digital warfare has made things go downhill again.
• The many ways your phone might be weaponized against you by a high-tech enemy faction have implications for all sorts of games and stories involving war, conspiracy theory, espionage, robot war, etc.
• Interestingly there are a lot of international "anon" digital vigilantes who are engaging in data warfare … which is bad news for the Russians, but possibly tricky on other levels: say, for example, an unwise hacker gets into Russian public infrastructure and causes a major public disaster - melting down an nuclear power station, causing a major rail crash, that sort of thing. What kind of retaliation might that attract? Especially if the Russian government suspects it of being a state sponsored attack?