1. Bombs and missiles are obvious to the eye but the warfare was not contained in the physical world. The cyber warfare has been waged before the first bullet flew off in Ukraine.
2. On 23 Feb 2022, Microsoft picked up a “wiper” malware that aimed at the country’s government ministries and financial institutions. The company warned Ukraine about it and subsequently patched the systems to block the code.
3. Belarusian-backed hacking group Ghostwriter gained access to several social media accounts to post videos of a weakened Ukrainian troop and scenes of surrender. Meta has since blocked all domains associated with the group.
4. Ukrainian cybersecurity officials reported that UNC1151 from Belarus were targeting the private email addresses of Ukrainian military personnel.
5. I believe there were more cases unreported or undetected. Some were even wondering why Ukrainian computer networks have yet to be crippled given Russian’s forte in hacking. It could be due to the increased defence from Ukraine and the West or it could be Russia waiting for an opportune time to up the ante.
6. It isn’t a one sided affair as Ukraine has a volunteer army of hackers trying to do damage to the systems in Russia.
7. Even the notorious hacking group Anonymous has vowed to hack Russia. It has since claimed to have taken data from Belarusian weapons manufacturer Tetraedr.
8. The cyber attacks were not limited to the countries in conflict. Other hacking groups are taking advantage of the chaos to avoid attention and increase their hacking pursuits.
9. Just yesterday, the LAPSU$ group in South America, managed to extract over 1TB of Nvidia’s data.
10. There could be collateral damage to the rest of the world as this cyber warfare intensifies. We might experience more hacking incidents or become unintended victims – just like biological viruses, computer viruses can be contagious and spread to the rest of the world when unconfined.
11. Cybersecurity companies may see their businesses pick up as governments and corporations beef up their cyber defence. The markets seem to suggest so.
12. First Trust NASDAQ Cybersecurity ETF (CIBR) has gained 9% in the past 5 days. Below are some cybersecurity stocks’ 5-day performance:
Cloudflare +24%
Crowdstrike +16%
Palo Alto +14%
Fortinet +12%
13. iShares U.S. Aerospace & Defense ETF (ITA) can be a market indicator for whether US is engaging in a conventional war with kinetic weapons. It has gained 6% in the past 5 days, so it suggests the odds of US involvement have increased.
14. But given that CIBR has made even more gains than ITA, that means the higher intensity war is being fought virtually as of now. I don’t see this cyber war going away anytime soon and I think cybersecurity stocks may have more legs to run.
