As Ukraine leads the global fight for democracy, Taiwan, facing a potential war with China, should draw lessons from Ukraine’s cyberwarfare success.
Taiwan has been enhancing its arsenal with advanced weapons from the West in anticipation of a possible full-scale invasion.
However, Taipei should also consider Ukraine’s effective digital warfare, notably the “IT [information technology] Army,” a decentralized force instrumental in Kyiv’s cybercampaigns.
In February 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marked the onset of a significant cyberwar, where fears of a “digital Pearl Harbor” in Ukraine were unmet, thanks to robust cyberdefenses backed by Western public and private support. This led to the formation of the IT Army under the Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation, a pre-emptive move Taiwan should replicate before facing threats.
The IT Army has played an important role in Ukraine’s cyberoffensives. These include leaking documents from Russia’s central bank, disrupting Internet services in territories occupied by Russia, incapacitating one of Moscow’s major Internet providers and targeting private corporations to hinder economic activities.
The primary tactic of the IT Army involves executing distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. This approach is simple yet effective — it involves coordinating a large number of computers to launch a concerted attack on a specific network or Web site. By flooding the target with an overwhelming volume of requests, the strategy aims to overload the system, ultimately causing it to crash.
At one point, these tactics, which disrupted 40 percent of the resources of Russian Internet providers, have not only caused direct damage, but also showcased the power of coordinated DDoS attacks. These attacks, simple yet effective, overload targeted networks, causing them to crash, a tactic that could be equally devastating against China.
Despite a decline in the visible size of the Ukrainian IT Army, its operations have escalated in impact, suggesting that effective cyberwarfare does not solely depend on numbers. The group’s efforts have reportedly inflicted economic losses on Russia estimated at US$1 billion to US$2 billion.
“Economic exhaustion plays a decisive role in the outcome of conflicts, and cyberoperations, including DDoS attacks and hacker interventions, are powerful tools in achieving this objective.” Ukrainian IT Army spokesperson Ted (a pseudonym) said.
This same tactic of economic exhaustion can equally be applied to China’s resources.
However, creating a volunteer IT Army poses challenges, including the need for legal structures to protect participants. Ukraine has been attempting to draft legislation to provide a more formal legal structure to the fairly informal IT Army. Taiwan too, should consider moving forward with similar legislation to build a legal structure. This legal framework would offer protections similar to those in armed combat, an approach Taiwan could also adopt to safeguard its cybervolunteers.
As Minister of Foreign Affairs Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) indicated, Taiwan is gearing up for potential conflict by 2027. If such a time frame is realistic, Taipei must immediately mobilize all available resources to prepare for this potential conflict, by which time an even more digitized world would make cyberwarfare a crucial battlefield.
China’s deep integration and reliance on technology would also make it more vulnerable to attacks from groups like an IT volunteer army. In fact, successful cyberoperations by Taiwan could have the potential to inflict substantial economic and operational losses on China, thereby limiting some of Beijing’s military power projection.
Taiwan should create a detailed plan for swiftly assembling its own digital defense force. Similarly, inspired by how Ukraine established secure communication channels to efficiently manage its cyberoperations, Taipei should also implement secure systems to coordinate its cyberarmy and precisely target vulnerabilities.
Taiwanese intelligence would also need to identify vulnerabilities, prepare botnets and establish gateways well in advance to penetrate China’s digital systems quickly. This preparatory work is essential to ensure that, in the event of a conflict, Taiwan can quickly and efficiently target critical Chinese infrastructure and systems.
However, not all preparations need to be technical. One limitation that the Ukrainian IT Army has faced is engaging with non-technical audiences. To scale the work of effective botnets and DDoS attacks, more people are needed to join the attacks.
However, the average civilian citizen does not consider themselves capable of conducting cyberattacks against the enemy. The reality is that anyone can follow simple instructions to download a tool and allow their computer’s processing power and Internet access to be added to the botnet and help flood an enemy’s networks to bring them down.
The Ukrainian IT Army has proved to be an effective fighting force against Russia in the cyber realm. As Taiwan prepares for a potential conflict with China, it must ensure maximum resistance by taking measures to ready itself not only for the physical battlefield, but also for digital warfare.
David Kirichenko is a freelance journalist and an associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, a London-based think tank. He previously participated in the MOSAIC Taiwan program offered by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
There are moments in history when America has turned its back on its principles and withdrawn from past commitments in service of higher goals. For example, US-Soviet Cold War competition compelled America to make a range of deals with unsavory and undemocratic figures across Latin America and Africa in service of geostrategic aims. The United States overlooked mass atrocities against the Bengali population in modern-day Bangladesh in the early 1970s in service of its tilt toward Pakistan, a relationship the Nixon administration deemed critical to its larger aims in developing relations with China. Then, of course, America switched diplomatic recognition
The international women’s soccer match between Taiwan and New Zealand at the Kaohsiung Nanzih Football Stadium, scheduled for Tuesday last week, was canceled at the last minute amid safety concerns over poor field conditions raised by the visiting team. The Football Ferns, as New Zealand’s women’s soccer team are known, had arrived in Taiwan one week earlier to prepare and soon raised their concerns. Efforts were made to improve the field, but the replacement patches of grass could not grow fast enough. The Football Ferns canceled the closed-door training match and then days later, the main event against Team Taiwan. The safety
The National Immigration Agency on Tuesday said it had notified some naturalized citizens from China that they still had to renounce their People’s Republic of China (PRC) citizenship. They must provide proof that they have canceled their household registration in China within three months of the receipt of the notice. If they do not, the agency said it would cancel their household registration in Taiwan. Chinese are required to give up their PRC citizenship and household registration to become Republic of China (ROC) nationals, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said. He was referring to Article 9-1 of the Act
The Chinese government on March 29 sent shock waves through the Tibetan Buddhist community by announcing the untimely death of one of its most revered spiritual figures, Hungkar Dorje Rinpoche. His sudden passing in Vietnam raised widespread suspicion and concern among his followers, who demanded an investigation. International human rights organization Human Rights Watch joined their call and urged a thorough investigation into his death, highlighting the potential involvement of the Chinese government. At just 56 years old, Rinpoche was influential not only as a spiritual leader, but also for his steadfast efforts to preserve and promote Tibetan identity and cultural
RSS