Will war in Ukraine lead to a wider cyber-conflict?

slammed into Kyiv on the morning of February 24th. But its computer networks were already long under attack. On February 23rd, as the country was still bracing for an invasion that was expected to be imminent, the websites of Ukraine’s parliament and several government agencies were put out of action. A similar digital assault on Ukrainian government websites and banks on February 15th and 16th was quickly attributed by America, Britain and other governments to the , Russia’s military-intelligence agency. Last month the websites of several government ministries were defaced with the message, “Be afraid and expect the worst.”How bad could a modern cyberwar be, and will other countries be affected? “Ukraine, sadly, has been Russia’s cyber playground for years,” notes Ciaran Martin, the founding chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre, the defensive arm of , Britain’s signals-intelligence agency. In 2016 suspected Russian malware disrupted Ukraine’s electricity grid and cut power to a fifth of Kyiv in the middle of a bitter winter. Inspired partly by Stuxnet, a suspected American-Israeli “worm” that disrupted Iran’s uranium-enrichment centrifuges, the attack was aimed at the protective relays which shut down electrical systems in abnormal conditions. Two years later Ukraine said it had halted a suspected Russian attempt to disrupt a chlorine plant.