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WASHINGTON — A new review of how Russia used its cyber capabilities in the first months of the war in Ukraine contains a number of surprises: Moscow carried out more cyberattacks in support of its invasion than was carried out at the time, but more than two-thirds of them failed, its poor performance on the physical battlefield. reflects.

However, the work Published by Microsoft on WednesdayHe argued that President Vladimir V. Putin’s government has been more successful than expected with its disinformation campaign to create a war narrative in Russia’s favor, including alleging that the United States is secretly producing biological weapons inside Ukraine.

The report is the latest effort by many groups, including American intelligence agencies, to understand the interaction of parallel and often coordinated combat in cyberspace with brutal physical warfare. IT He stated that Ukraine is ready to fend off cyberattacks after enduring many years. This was due, at least in part, to a well-established alert system from private sector companies including Microsoft and Google, and preparations that included moving many of Ukraine’s most important systems to the cloud, to servers outside Ukraine.

Russia’s account of cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns showed that only 29 percent of attacks breached targeted networks – in Ukraine, the United States, Poland and the Baltic states. But it marks a more successful effort underway to dominate the information war, which Russia accuses Washington and Kiev of initiating the conflict, which is now escalating in eastern and southern Ukraine.

The war is the first full-scale war to use conventional and cyber weapons side by side, and the race to explore the never-before-seen dynamic continues between the two. So far, very little of this dynamic has developed as expected.

Initially, analysts and government officials were surprised by the absence of Russia’s crippling attacks on Ukraine’s power grid and communications systems. In April, President Biden’s national cyber director Chris Inglis said that “the current problem” is that Russia “is not playing a very important cyber game, at least against NATO and the United States.” He claimed the Russians thought they were on their way to a swift victory in February, but were “distracted” when the war effort ran into obstacles.

The Microsoft report said that Russia attempted a major cyberattack on February 23, the day before the physical invasion. Using the FoxBlade malware, this attack was an attempt to use “wiper” software that wipes data on government networks. At roughly the same time, Russia attacked the Viasat satellite communications network, hoping to cripple the Ukrainian military.

“We I think he was among the first to witness the first shots fired on February 23,” said Brad Smith, president of Microsoft.

“It’s been a formidable, intense, even brutal series of attacks, really coordinated attacks from different parts of the Russian government, starting with some kind of wiper software,” he added at a forum in Ronald on Wednesday. Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, Washington.

But most of the attacks were blocked or there was enough redundancy in Ukrainian networks that the efforts did little damage. As a result, Mr Smith said the attacks were under-reported.

Mr. Smith said that in many cases Russia has coordinated the use of cyber weapons with conventional attacks. Microsoft officials declined to reveal which factory Mr. Smith was talking about.

While most of Russia’s cyber activity is focused on Ukraine, Microsoft has detected 128 network intrusions in 42 countries. Microsoft concluded that of the 29 percent of Russian attacks that successfully infiltrated a network, only a quarter resulted in data being stolen.

Apart from Ukraine, Russia has focused its attacks on the USA, Poland and two candidate members of NATO, Sweden and Finland. Other alliance members were also targeted, especially as they began to supply Ukraine with more weapons. However, these breaches were limited to surveillance – this suggests that Moscow is trying to avoid bringing NATO countries into war through direct cyberattacks and avoiding physical attacks on those countries.

But Microsoft, other tech companies and government officials said Russia has matched these infiltration attempts with a broad effort to propagate around the world.

Microsoft tracked the rise in consumption of Russian propaganda in the US in the first weeks of the year. Just before the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, it reached 82 percent with 60 million to 80 million monthly page views. Microsoft said that figure competes with pageviews on the largest traditional media sites in the United States.

One example that Mr. Smith cites is Russian propaganda inside Russia forcing its citizens to get vaccinated and spreading anti-vaccine content in English messages.

Microsoft also tracked a surge in Russian propaganda in Canada in the weeks before a convoy of truck drivers protesting vaccine missions tried to shut down Ottawa and protests in New Zealand against public health measures to combat the pandemic.

“It is not a consumption event that follows the news; Not even an amplification effort following the news,” said Mr. Smith. “But it’s fair to say that it’s not just this expansion that precedes the news, it’s also a case of trying to create and influence the creation of the news of the day.”

Senator Angus King, who is independent of Maine and a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, noted that while private companies can monitor Russia’s efforts to spread disinformation within the United States, American intelligence agencies are limited by laws that prevent them from looking into American networks.

“There’s a loophole and I think the Russians are aware of that and that allowed them to exploit a vulnerability in our system,” said Mr King, who also spoke at the Reagan Institute.

A provision addressed by Congress in this year’s defense policy bill would require the National Security Agency and its military cousin, the United States Cyber ​​Command, to report to Congress every two years on electoral security, including efforts by Russia and other foreign powers to influence Americans. .

“Ultimately, the best defense is for our own people to become better consumers of information,” said Mr. King. “We have to do a better job of educating people to be better consumers of information. I call it digital literacy. And we need to teach fourth and fifth grade kids how to distinguish a fake website from a real one.”