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.
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