The Petya malware virus, which began to spread on Tuesday from Ukraine, paralyzed the work of many companies around the world. The cyberattack affected countries in Europe, Asia, the Americas and Russia. Valdai Club expert Oleg Demidov believes that this is not a cyberwar. However, if an international military conflict begins in the near future, it will be necessarily accompanied by operations in cyberspace, which can be quite serious and disastrous.
"I cannot imagine Petya as a targeted attack against someone, because it spreads absolutely indiscriminately. It affects all systems, all devices that it can infect . . . Attacks related to the spread of viruses to companies can not be considered cyber war, " Oleg Demidov, consultant on the cybersecurity strategy of the PIR Center, told valdaiclub.com.
A separate matter is if an international military conflict begins in the near future. In that case, it will be accompanied by special operations in cyberspace, which can be quite serious and disastrous, Demidov said.
"These actions can be extended to strategic infrastructure facilities, national energy systems and so on. This is hypothetically possible," he added.
According to Demidov, if global players fail to take a number of common measures to contain cyberattacks in the foreseeable future, the scenario of the future of cybersecurity may be quite pessimistic.
"Under these conditions, Russia, like other countries, will drift towards partial self-isolation to ensure its security in cyberspace . . . This implies tightening control over cross-border data transmission, including traffic routing, under the pretext of protection from cyberattacks and cyber operations, building a model that is partially isolated from the global network, which would insure against cross-border attacks," Demidov said.
However, this protection will be achieved at an extremely high cost: "The cost is that the development of the digital economy and the participation of Russia [and other countries] in the global digital economy market will suffer," Demidov said.
There are currently no governmental-level organizations for the exchange of information on cybersecurity incidents, although there are several private ones, which include state-owned companies. This includes, among others, the computer emergency response teams (CERT). They interact on international platforms, the largest of which is FIRST (Forum for Incident Response and Security Teams), an international forum for practices exchange.
"If we talk about a single international system for responding to computer incidents in real time, its creation is hampered by a low level of trust between states, because such cooperation presumes that you communicate and transmit information related to computer incidents," Oleg Demidov said. "And this information can be quite sensitive. For example, if the strategic infrastructure has suffered, you need to disclose the type of infrastructure, what is the scale of damage, what processes were violated, and so on. And this is an area of state interests, national security, where there is not enough confidence."
But there is also an optimistic scenario, which, however, does not preclude the danger of future cyber threats. It would mean the emergence of an international system to combat these challenges, including the creation of joint mechanisms to respond to cyberattacks, to develop common rules for the protection of strategic infrastructure, and so on.
"If Russia leads by example with trust and encourages private organizations to participate in the exchange of information, if we manage to find a common language with key partners (such as the United States, China and the European Union), then the future progress [in the field of cybersecurity] is possible," Demidov said. Moreover, the emergence of such an international system to combat cyberattacks will show that trust has emerged between the key players, including Russia.
