Blog
/
/
August 15, 2022

Modern Cyber War: Our Role in New Cyber-Attacks

Explore the roles we all play in the modern cyber war and how you can protect your digital assets in an evolving threat landscape.
Inside the SOC
Darktrace cyber analysts are world-class experts in threat intelligence, threat hunting and incident response, and provide 24/7 SOC support to thousands of Darktrace customers around the globe. Inside the SOC is exclusively authored by these experts, providing analysis of cyber incidents and threat trends, based on real-world experience in the field.
Written by
Marcus Fowler
CEO of Darktrace Federal and SVP of Strategic Engagements and Threats
Written by
Sam Corbett
Content Marketing Executive
Default blog imageDefault blog imageDefault blog imageDefault blog imageDefault blog imageDefault blog image
15
Aug 2022

Cyber warfare is increasingly being conducted outside of centralized military or government efforts. In Ukraine, without direct government supervision, thousands of private individuals and organizations are involving themselves in the cyber-war against Russia. Yurii Shchyhol is head of Ukraine’s State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection. Speaking to Politico, he commends a group of “more than 270,000 volunteers who are self-coordinating their efforts and who can decide, plan, and execute any strikes on the Russian cyber infrastructure without Ukraine getting involved in any shape or form.”

‘Hacktivists’ have existed since the 1990s, but the term seems ill-suited to the scale and approach Shchyhol is describing. They might instead be labelled an auxiliary cyber force, playing a supportive role in a larger military effort. Shchyhol himself calls them “an army”. 

Open-source warfare

In the modern cyber landscape, anyone with a computer and a basic skill set can contribute to a war. Depending on who and perhaps where you are, this fact is inspiring, concerning, or a little of both. The challenge of distinguishing between official nation-state attacks and hacktivists raises certain issues, making it possible, for instance, for nation-states to conduct devastating attacks against critical national infrastructure from behind a mask of proxy criminal organizations. The ties between nation states and these organizations may be suspected, but any accusations are rarely confirmed. 

The converse problem is seen when idealistic individual actors launch provocative attacks with the potential to stoke tensions between nation states. Recent DDoS and defacement attacks against Taiwanese government sites and businesses are largely being attributed to Chinese hacktivists, but with the perpetrators unidentified, these attacks remain a concerning question mark and do little to ameliorate sharply rising tensions. A spokesperson for Taiwan’s ruling party has already said in a statement that these attacks are “unilaterally raising the situation in the Taiwan Strait.” Official Taiwanese websites, like that of the Presidential Office, the Ministry of National Defense, and a municipal Environment Protection Bureau have all been targeted, the latter defaced with five Chinese national flags. 

A spate of similar defacements preceded Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine, with more than a dozen Ukrainian national websites made to display threats like, “be afraid and expect the worst”. Once again, the perpetrators of this attack remained unconfirmed, with Ukrainian government institutions accusing the Russian Federation, and Russia denying all involvement. The degree to which modern war efforts can be influenced by – or concealed behind – individual threat actors is a new and disconcerting symptom of the modern cyber landscape. There are, however, more official ways in which cyber warfare has moved beyond government and military organizations as well.

Calling in a private cavalry

Just 15 months after it was opened by President Volodymyr Zelensky, the UA30 Cyber Center in Ukraine lies largely empty. It is located in an unsafe part of the war-torn country, and its operations have had to be moved elsewhere. In the time between its opening and Russia’s invasion in February, however, the center was able to host more than 100 cyber security training sessions. These sessions, which involved realistic cyber-attack simulations, hackathons, and other competitions, were attended by some military operators, but also by large numbers of civilian contractors and private sector representatives. Their attendance was part of an intentional and significant effort to involve the private sector in Ukraine’s cyber defense efforts. 

Shchyhol explains, “a lot of private sector IT cyber security experts are either directly serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine or my State Service or otherwise are indirectly involved in fighting against cyber-attacks.” This is the realization of the UA30 Cyber Center’s aim: using crucial assistance and expertise from the private sector in national cyber-defense efforts, and bolstering the security of those organizations on which Ukraine’s critical national infrastructure depends. As we have seen with attacks against Ukrainian telecom and internet providers, organizations operating the infrastructure which underpins a population’s daily life are often the first – and most appealing – targets for attackers looking to create disorder within a nation. 

It is not only Ukraine’s own private sector which is lending a hand. International organizations like SpaceX and Amazon have contributed to Ukraine’s efforts by providing technology and infrastructure, as well as their own expertise and services. In its report on Early Lessons from the Cyber War, Microsoft suggests that “defense against a military invasion now requires for most countries the ability to disperse and distribute digital operations and data assets across borders and into other countries”. With cloud services provided by Amazon, Microsoft and others, and data now hosted across Europe, Ukraine is managing to do just that. Like its army of guerilla cyber-fighters, the involvement of private organizations is dispersing and bolstering Ukraine’s war effort.

The new home front

Beyond these direct contributions, however, Shchyhol also notes those private sector organizations supporting the cyber-war “indirectly”. These indirect efforts have been a focus of US government statements on cyber security since the beginning of the conflict. A statement from President Biden in March read, “I urge our private sector partners to harden your cyber defenses immediately”, a message which has been repeated and reinforced by CISA.  

The great responsibility which private organizations have for critical national infrastructure has been highlighted in attacks like that on Colonial Pipeline last year, but organizations in every industry can offer opportunities for nation-state attackers. When more organizations are sufficiently prepared for cyber-attacks, the nation as a whole becomes stronger. 

In its report, Microsoft calls for “a common strategy” to thwart modern cyber-threats, which includes the need for greater public and private collaboration and advances in digital technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and data. By adopting stronger defenses, and employing well-suited emerging AI technologies, organizations can accelerate the detection and prevention of threats, and contribute to national security in the face of constantly developing international cyber-threats. 

When cyber-attackers are provided with funding, coordination, and thorough threat security intelligence, they can create scores of never-before-seen attacks, which circumvent pre-established security rules and avoid detection. As attackers develop their approach, so must defenders - not just by employing the latest technologies, but by embracing the changes in defensive strategy which those technologies enable. Defenders need to pivot away from focusing on patterns and predictions, and concentrate on understanding the landscapes and ‘normal’ operations of their digital environments. With this approach they can harden attack paths, visualize their internet-facing attack surface, detect the smallest deviations from ‘normal’, and disrupt attackers before damage is done.  

For private sector organizations, auxiliary cyber forces, and hacktivists alike, focusing on defensive rather than offensive action will be the surest way to win the battle and the war. 

Inside the SOC
Darktrace cyber analysts are world-class experts in threat intelligence, threat hunting and incident response, and provide 24/7 SOC support to thousands of Darktrace customers around the globe. Inside the SOC is exclusively authored by these experts, providing analysis of cyber incidents and threat trends, based on real-world experience in the field.
Written by
Marcus Fowler
CEO of Darktrace Federal and SVP of Strategic Engagements and Threats
Written by
Sam Corbett
Content Marketing Executive

More in this series

No items found.

Blog

/

/

September 23, 2025

It’s Time to Rethink Cloud Investigations

cloud investigationsDefault blog imageDefault blog image

Cloud Breaches Are Surging

Cloud adoption has revolutionized how businesses operate, offering speed, scalability, and flexibility. But for security teams, this transformation has introduced a new set of challenges, especially when it comes to incident response (IR) and forensic investigations.

Cloud-related breaches are skyrocketing – 82% of breaches now involve cloud-stored data (IBM Cost of a Data Breach, 2023). Yet incidents often go unnoticed for days: according to a 2025 report by Cybersecurity Insiders, of the 65% of organizations experienced a cloud-related incident in the past year, only 9% detected it within the first hour, and 62% took more than 24 hours to remediate it (Cybersecurity Insiders, Cloud Security Report 2025).

Despite the shift to cloud, many investigation practices remain rooted in legacy on-prem approaches. According to a recent report, 65% of organizations spend approximately 3-5 days longer when investigating an incident in the cloud vs. on premises.

Cloud investigations must evolve, or risk falling behind attackers who are already exploiting the cloud’s speed and complexity.

4 Reasons Cloud Investigations Are Broken

The cloud’s dynamic nature – with its ephemeral workloads and distributed architecture – has outpaced traditional incident response methods. What worked in static, on-prem environments simply doesn’t translate.

Here’s why:

  1. Ephemeral workloads
    Containers and serverless functions can spin up and vanish in minutes. Attackers know this as well – they’re exploiting short-lived assets for “hit-and-run” attacks, leaving almost no forensic footprint. If you’re relying on scheduled scans or manual evidence collection, you’re already too late.
  2. Fragmented tooling
    Each cloud provider has its own logs, APIs, and investigation workflows. In addition, not all logs are enabled by default, cloud providers typically limit the scope of their logs (both in terms of what data they collect and how long they retain it), and some logs are only available through undocumented APIs. This creates siloed views of attacker activity, making it difficult to piece together a coherent timeline. Now layer in SaaS apps, Kubernetes clusters, and shadow IT — suddenly you’re stitching together 20+ tools just to find out what happened. Analysts call it the ‘swivel-chair Olympics,’ and it’s burning hours they don’t have.
  3. SOC overload
    Analysts spend the bulk of their time manually gathering evidence and correlating logs rather than responding to threats. This slows down investigations and increases burnout. SOC teams are drowning in noise; they receive thousands of alerts a day, the majority of which never get touched. False positives eat hundreds of hours a month, and consequently burnout is rife.  
  4. Cost of delay
    The longer an investigation takes, the higher its cost. Breaches contained in under 200 days save an average of over $1M compared to those that linger (IBM Cost of a Data Breach 2025).

These challenges create a dangerous gap for threat actors to exploit. By the time evidence is collected, attackers may have already accessed or exfiltrated data, or entrenched themselves deeper into your environment.

What’s Needed: A New Approach to Cloud Investigations

It’s time to ditch the manual, reactive grind and embrace investigations that are automated, proactive, and built for the world you actually defend. Here’s what the next generation of cloud forensics must deliver:

  • Automated evidence acquisition
    Capture forensic-level data the moment a threat is detected and before assets disappear.
  • Unified multi-cloud visibility
    Stitch together logs, timelines, and context across AWS, Azure, GCP, and hybrid environments into a single unified view of the investigation.
  • Accelerated investigation workflows
    Reduce time-to-insight from hours or days to minutes with automated analysis of forensic data, enabling faster containment and recovery.
  • Empowered SOC teams
    Fully contextualised data and collaboration workflows between teams in the SOC ensure seamless handover, freeing up analysts from manual collection tasks so they can focus on what matters: analysis and response.

Attackers are already leveraging the cloud’s agility. Defenders must do the same — adopting solutions that match the speed and scale of modern infrastructure.

Cloud Changed Everything. It’s Time to Change Investigations.  

The cloud fundamentally reshaped how businesses operate. It’s time for security teams to rethink how they investigate threats.

Forensics can no longer be slow, manual, and reactive. It must be instant, automated, and cloud-first — designed to meet the demands of ephemeral infrastructure and multi-cloud complexity.

The future of incident response isn’t just faster. It’s smarter, more scalable, and built for the environments we defend today, not those of ten years ago.  

On October 9th, Darktrace is revealing the next big thing in cloud security. Don’t miss it – sign up for the webinar.

darktrace live event launch
Continue reading
About the author
Kellie Regan
Director, Product Marketing - Cloud Security

Blog

/

/

September 22, 2025

Understanding the Canadian Critical Cyber Systems Protection Act

Canadian critical cyber systems protection actDefault blog imageDefault blog image

Introduction: The Canadian Critical Cyber Systems Protection Act

On 18 June 2025, the Canadian federal Government introduced Bill C-8 which, if adopted following completion of the legislative process, will enact the Critical Cyber Systems Protection Act (CCSPA) and give Canada its first federal, cross-sector and legally binding cybersecurity regime for designated critical infrastructure providers. As of August 2025, the Bill has completed first reading and stands at second reading in the Canadian House of Commons.

Political context

The measure revives most of the stalled 2022 Bill C-26 “An Act Respecting Cyber Security” which “died on Paper” when Parliament was prorogued in January 2025, in the wake of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s resignation.

The new government, led by Mark Carney since March 2025, has re-tabled the package with the same two-part structure: (1) amendments to the Telecommunications Act that enable security directions to telecoms; and (2) a new CCSPA setting out mandatory cybersecurity duties for designated operators. This blog focuses on the latter.

If enacted, Canada will join fellow Five Eyes partners such as the United Kingdom and Australia, which already impose statutory cyber-security duties on operators of critical national infrastructure.

The case for new cybersecurity legislation in Canada

The Canadian cyber threat landscape has expanded. The country's national cyber authority, the Canadian Centre for Cybersecurity (Cyber Centre), recently assessed that the number of cyber incidents has “sharply increased” in the last two years, as has the severity of those incidents, with essential services providers among the targets. Likewise, in its 2025-2026 National Cyber Threat Assessment, the Cyber Centre warned that AI technologies are “amplifying cyberspace threats” by lowering barriers to entry, improving the speed and sophistication of social-engineering attacks and enabling more precise operations.

This context mirrors what we are seeing globally: adversaries, including state actors, are taking advantage of the availability and sophistication of AI tools, which they have leverage to amplify the effectiveness of their operations. In this increasingly complex landscape, regulation must keep pace and evolve in step with the risk.

What the Canadian Critical Cyber Systems Protection Act aims to achieve

  • If enacted, the CCSPA will apply to operators in federally regulated critical infrastructure sectors which are vital to national security and public safety, as further defined in “Scope” below (the “Regulated Entities”), to adopt and comply with a minimum standard of cybersecurity duties (further described below)  which align with those its Five Eyes counterparts are already adhering to.

Who does the CCSPA apply to

The CCSPA would apply to designated operators that deliver services or systems within federal jurisdiction in the following priority areas:

  • telecommunications services
  • interprovincial or international pipeline and power line systems, nuclear energy systems, transportation systems
  • banking and clearing  
  • settlement systems

The CCSPA would also grant the Governor in Council (Federal Cabinet) with powers to add or remove entities in scope via regulation.

Scope of the CCSPA

The CCSPA introduces two key instruments:

First, it strengthens cyber threat information sharing between responsible ministers, sector regulators, and the Communications Security Establishment (through the Cyber Centre).

Second, it empowers the Governor in Council (GIC) to issue Cyber Security Directions (CSDs) - binding orders requiring a designated operator to implement specified measures to protect a critical cyber system within defined timeframes.

CSDs may be tailored to an individual operator or applied to a class of operators and can address technology, process, or supplier risks. To safeguard security and commercial confidentiality, the CCSPA restricts disclosure of the existence or content of a CSD except as necessary to carry it out.

Locating decision-making with the GIC ensures that CSDs are made with a cross-government view that weighs national security, economic priorities and international agreement.

New obligations for designated providers

The CCSPA would impose key cybersecurity compliance and obligations on designated providers. As it stands, this includes:

  1. Establishing and maintaining cybersecurity programs: these will need to be comprehensive, proportionate and developed proactively. Once implemented, they will need to be continuously reviewed
  2. Mitigating supply chain risks: Regulated Entities will be required to assess their third-party products and services by conducting a supply chain analysis, and take active steps to mitigate any identified risks
  3. Reporting incidents:  Regulated Entities will need to be more transparent with their reporting, by making the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) aware of any incident which has, or could potentially have, an impact on a critical system. The reports must be made within specific timelines, but in any event within no more than 72 hours;
  4. Compliance with cybersecurity directions:  the government will, under the CCSPA, have the authority to issue cybersecurity directives in an effort to remain responsive to emerging threats, which Regulated Entities will be required to follow once issued
  5. Record keeping: this shouldn’t be a surprise to many of those Regulated Entities which fall in scope, which are already likely to be subject to record keeping requirements. Regulated Entities should expect to be maintaining records and conducting audits of their systems and processes against the requirements of the CCSPA

It should be noted, however, that this may be subject to change, so Regulated Entities should keep an eye on the progress of the Bill as it makes its way through parliament.

Enforcement of the Act would be carried out by sector-specific regulators identified in the Act such as the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, Minister of Transport, Canada Energy Regulator, Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and the Ministry of Industry.

What are the penalties for CCSPA non-compliance?

When assessing the penalties associated with non-compliance with the requirements of the CCSPA, it is clear that such non-compliance will be taken seriously, and the severity of the penalties follows the trend of those applied by the European Union to key pieces of EU legislation. The “administrative monetary penalties” (AMPs) set by regulation could see fines being applied of up to C$1 million for individuals and up to C$15 million for organizations.

Continue reading
About the author
The Darktrace Community
Your data. Our AI.
Elevate your network security with Darktrace AI