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BORYSPIL, Ukraine -- When departure information disappeared from Kiev airport's website after last month's cyberattack, employees trained a camera on the departure board and broadcast it to YouTube. When government servers were switched off, officials posted updates to Facebook. And with the disruption continuing, office workers have turned to Gmail to keep their businesses going.

As Ukraine's digital infrastructure shuddered under the weight of the June 27 cyberattack, Silicon Valley firms played an outsize role in keeping information flowing, an illustration both of their vast reach and their unofficial role as a kind of emergency backup system. Google's mail service has been helping some firms stay open after their email servers crashed, while Facebook is credited as a critical platform for digital first responders.

"Our war room, nationwide, migrated to Facebook," said Andrey Chigarkin, the chief information security officer at a Kiev-based gaming firm and active participant in the early hours of the online response. "All the news -- bad, good -- was coming through Facebook."

Facebook has a relatively low popularity in Ukraine, counting between 8 million to 9 million monthly active users compared to 10 million to 15 million in Poland, a neighbor of roughly the same size, according to figures provided by analytics firm SocialBakers. But it's still a powerful medium there and is credited with being an accelerant for the protest movement that toppled the Russia-friendly leader Viktor Yanukovich in 2014. Today, government agencies regularly post official statements to their Facebook walls, and press officers eschew emails to chat with journalists over Facebook Messenger.

"Facebook in Ukraine is a big thing," said Dmytro Shymkiv, the deputy head of Ukraine's presidential administration and a former director of Microsoft Ukraine.

Shymkiv was among the many officials who turned to Facebook to post updates about the outbreak as it happened. In an interview at his office, he said "the cloud" -- a marketing term for the pool of sometimes free computing power offered by the likes of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and many others -- provided the safety and redundancy that many businesses in Ukraine lacked.

"It's a global backup," he said, adding that, as a former tech executive, he knew that Silicon Valley firms put an "enormous focus on the security of the cloud services."

Private businesses and even government offices are still relying at least in part on Silicon Valley firms' email and chat services, mainly as a substitute for downed mail servers. Victor Zhora, the chief executive of Kiev-based Infosafe, said two of the firms he's helping to recover from the outbreak have switched to Gmail as they try to get back on their feet. In one pediatric clinic in the Kharkivskyi area of Kiev, Dr. Lidiia Podkopaieva said staff turned to Facebook-owned WhatsApp to coordinate their work at the facility after half their computers were wiped out.

Some workarounds were more creative than others.

At Boryspil Airport, outside Kiev, officials faced a quandary when they switched off their automated systems during the attack. Although the airport was operating smoothly, anxious passengers could no longer access departure information from the Web.

"So in front of the departure board we set up a webcam which broadcast the board to the Web and to our Facebook page," senior airport official Yevhenii Dykhne said in an interview last week. "We got 10,000 views on YouTube."

Infrastructure Minister Volodymyr Omelyan said the outbreak had shown that the Silicon Valley's cloud was much more resilient "than a Ukrainian physical server standing alone in a post office," a reference to one of Ukraine's worst-hit agencies.

But he expressed reservations about leaning too heavily on American computing power in times of need. After all, what would happen if a differently tailored cyberattack brought the cloud crashing down?

"Definitely we should build a much more sustainable network in case of emergency," he said. "We cannot just rely on Facebook as a backup."

Information for this article was contributed by Dmytro Vlasov and Efrem Lukatsky of The Associated Press.

SundayMonday Business on 07/10/2017

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Ukrainian services hit by virus jury-rigged Facebook, Google - Arkansas Online

HAMBURG Measures are needed that will lead to a genuine ceasefire in Ukraine, and implementation of the Minsk agreements to end the conflict there has been too slow, the Kremlin said on Saturday.

With Ukraine on the agenda, President Vladimir Putin earlier met with his counterparts from France and Germany, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel, on the fringes of the G20 summit in Hamburg.

Macron said he had no ready solution to the crisis, but that the three countries had had a "good discussion" about it.

"If I had a solution in my pocket I would have already used it and shared it with my friends," the French president said in a video posted on his Facebook account.

"We know how complicated the situation is on the ground, so we are negotiating."

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there was an understanding between the three countries that "effective measures should be taken, which would lead to real ceasefire on the frontline and to ensure military hardware withdrawal".

"The Minsk accords are being implemented too slowly, serious disappointment is not concealed," Peskov told reporters during a regular conference call.

Macron said Normandy format talks involving France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine would probably take place in coming weeks.

Progress on implementing the Minsk peace accords in an eastern Ukrainian, negotiated by Berlin and Paris, has stalled. The agreement was designed to end a conflict that has killed thousands of people since April 2014.

(Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin and Marine Pennetier; editing by John Stonestreet)

HAMBURG Leaders from the world's leading economies broke with U.S. President Donald Trump on climate policy at a G20 summit on Saturday, in a rare public admission of disagreement and blow to multilateral cooperation.

MOSUL/ERBIL, Iraq Islamic State militants vowed to "fight to the death" in Mosul on Saturday as Iraqi military commanders said they would take full control of the city from the insurgents at any moment.

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Kremlin says steps needed for genuine ceasefire in Ukraine - Reuters

Most Americans might consider the events occurring in Ukrainea distant conflict somewhere along the border between the Russian Federation and Western Europeto be someone elses problem. What that perspective fails to appreciate, however, is how these seemingly distant events set the stage for a new form of hybrid warfare that is already targeting Western citizens. Many of the techniques we are observing in Ukraine, especially those in the digital realm, are not meaningfully constrained by international borders; if left unchecked they could significantly undermine Western digital, physical, and political structures.

The characteristics of hybrid warfare are the flexible use of conventional, unconventional, political, and economic means to achieve strategic ends while avoiding broader international conflict. Ukraines experiences places it on the front lines of this new form of conflictit has seen kinetic operations in Crimea and the Donbas; cyber attacks; unconventional tactics like targeted assassinations; distributed hit lists against Ukrainian officials, officers, and soldiers; and information operations directed against the population.

For the past ten days, our research team from the Army Cyber Institute has been on the ground in Ukraine meeting with NGOs, businesses, journalists, government ministries, universities, the army staff, and individual soldiers and civilians across the country. When the Petya cyber attacks began to wreak havoc across Ukraines civilian and business infrastructure, we were traveling on a rail line affected by the attack.While our travel was not interrupted, the incident dominated Ukrainian news outlets, radio, and conversation, providing an indication of the psychological impact of these events. This illustrates one of the central lessons of the conflict in Ukraine: individual cyber attacks may not cause devastating physical damage, but the toll they wage on the consciousness of a nation suffering under the weight of inflation, economic stagnation, and an ongoing conventional conflict combine to create a siege mentality. What we have found illustrates how cyber attacks, as an element of hybrid warfare create effects felt broadly requiring a response that integrates multiple actors across public and private spheres.

Ukraine has experienced an impressive number of cyber attacks. In the last two years, the Ukrainian energy grid has been attacked twice. Rail, financial, aviation, security, and civilian business sectors have also sustained robust attacks. These events significantly affect the everyday lives of the countrys citizens. Cyber attacks cut off electricity to hundreds of thousands of customers, rendered ATMs inoperative, and interfered with access to medical records. In one especially disruptive incident, millions of Ukrainians were unable to access their bank accounts during the New Year holiday, one of the most important celebrations in the country. While Ukraine has been able to limit the permanent physical damage caused by these attacks, they have eroded confidence in Ukrainian President Poroshenkos administration as it tries to build democratic institutions in the midst of an ongoing conflict.

Nevertheless, Ukraine is resilient. It suffered immeasurably in the last century under the dual onslaught of Soviet and Nazi forces, losing nearly 16 million citizens to war and famine, the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, two political revolutions, and the ongoing economic depression. Adding to its historic fortitude, polling indicates that the majority of Ukrainians possess a desirefor a Western leaning national identity. These factors indicate that Ukraine is likely to weather the current crisis as well. However, the West should not and cannot afford to ignore the reality of what is happening in Ukraine, especially within its digital infrastructure.

Its psychological fortitude notwithstanding, Ukraines resilience to recent cyber attacks also stems from its relatively early stage of digital development. When our lead researcher served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kupiyansk Region of Kharkiv Oblast from 2005 until 2007, Ukraine had a rudimentary internet infrastructure. Over the past decade, Ukraines digital connectivity has improved from very low penetration dial-up internet and GPRS/EDGE mobile networks to high-speed cable and 3G connectivity. Despite these technological leaps, Ukraines digital infrastructure pales in comparison with that of most Western countries, including the United States. Many of Ukraines critical infrastructure systems still feature non-digital fallbacks or bypass digital systems altogether. For example, when hackers disabled seven substations during a 2015 cyber attack on the regional electricity distribution company Ukrainian Kyivoblenergo, operators were able to manually override the digital SCADA systems to restore power to approximately 225,000 customers. These analog capabilities are not intentional, but they provide Ukraine with options in the face of a digital onslaught.

We are in the process of learning the myriad ways digital weapons can achieve political effects and manipulate the digital and physical environments within nations. The United States and many Western nations lack similar analog systems to fall back on in the event of an equivalent sustained attack. Long ago, we traded the resilience of non-digital back-up systems for digital convenience and modernization. This has resulted in substantial returns on investment and created new markets and efficiencies that propel our economies and societies forward. However, we must also realize that the internet in Ukraine and the internet in America are one and the same. The very same skills and tools, whether technical or informational, being used on foreign networks are also appearing in the United States and Western Europe. And yet our systemic vulnerabilities are far more expansive.

Ukrainea nation whose name translates to on the borderland or borderlandis once again the frontier of a conflict that threatens to engulf the West. Unlike Ukraines absorption of the Mongol invasions in the 13th century, the digital invasions of the 20th century are being honed against Ukraine and then spreading into global networks. If we ignore the plight of Ukraine, we miss the opportunity to prepare to defend ourselves against future challenges that will substantially impact the political, economic, and societal structures that lie at the foundation of western culture.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of West Point, the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

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Don't Ignore Ukraine: Lessons From the Borderland of the Internet - Lawfare (blog)

LONDON It is time for Kiev to show political will and privatise state-owned companies, the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) mission chief to the country said on Friday, though land reform needs more discussion and it could wait until the next review.

Kiev has been trying to push contested legislation through parliament, including raising the pension age and lifting a ban on land sales, as part of a $17.5 billion bailout agreed with the IMF in 2015.

The IMF's Ron van Rooden said after adopting the new privatisation law, it was time to act.

"They have not sold any companies in the past three years so it's time to show political will and bring some state-owned enterprises to sale," he said, speaking at a conference in London.

On the land reform, he added the fund would be willing to let that go to the next review.

"We think a bit more time and discussion is needed to come up with (a solution) on how to proceed."

(Reporting by Sujata Rao, writing by Karin Strohecker, editing by Nigel Stephenson)

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Ukraine Needs to Privatise State Companies-IMF - New York Times

U.S. News & World Report

Ukraine official: Worm likely hit 1 in 10 state, company PCs News & Observer A Ukrainian government official estimates that as many as one in 10 personal computers at companies and government offices across the country may have been compromised in the cyberattack that erupted on June 27. Dmytro Shymkiv, the deputy head of ... Ukraine Scrambles to Contain New Cyber Threat After 'NotPetya' AttackU.S. News & World Report Ukraine says it foiled 2nd cyberattack after police raidWichita Eagle Ukrainian Software Firm's Servers Seized After Cyber AttackNBCNews.com TheSpec.com -AP News -Reuters all 215 news articles »

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Ukraine official: Worm likely hit 1 in 10 state, company PCs - News & Observer