{"id":8404,"date":"2026-06-08T07:17:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-08T07:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/?p=8404"},"modified":"2026-06-08T07:17:00","modified_gmt":"2026-06-08T07:17:00","slug":"ukraines-foreign-minister-offer-recipe-for-improved-resilience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/?p=8404","title":{"rendered":"Ukraine\u2019s foreign minister offer recipe for improved resilience"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Cybersecurity professionals were offered lessons of resilience in the most extreme circumstances from Ukraine\u2019s former minister of foreign affairs.<\/p>\n

Dmytro Kuleba, who served as Ukraine\u2019s Minister of Foreign Affairs between 2020 and 2024, told Infosecurity Europe delegates that the key to Ukraine\u2019s survival after the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022 was pre-planning, a lesson learned in the early weeks of the war.<\/p>\n

Ukraine\u2019s largest mobile operator KyivStar was subjected to an outage in December 2023 because of a Russian cyberattack.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey got to the very core of their system of their network,\u201d Kuleba said. \u201cThey put it down, or they knocked it out, and the way they did it, they penetrated through an account of one single employee of KyivStar.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kuleba added: \u201cMiraculously, KyivStar did [the] unimaginable, and within days they restored the system and fenced it off.\u201d<\/p>\n

Few successful cyberattacks have happened since this incident, according to Kuleba, who credited this success on a pre-planning for resilience methodology that has been adopted by the Ukrainian government and businesses.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t know what and how it is going to happen,\u201d Kuleba said. \u201cBut you can presume, you can brainstorm, you can calculate, and you can prepare. You can prepare so that it becomes your muscle memory.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even if the unexpected happens you will be more prepared if you\u2019ve gone through preparations, Kuleba argued.<\/p>\n

\u201cMake no mistake when the crisis situation occurs, everything will be different,\u201d said Kuleba. \u201cYou will be punched in the face. You plan not to follow the plan but to know your environment perfectly and to develop instincts of survival in this environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Exodus<\/h2>\n

Kuleba began preparing Ukraine\u2019s foreign ministry for the war in November 2021, starting with learning precisely how its systems worked and planning for contingencies such as how diplomats and staff could communicate if online messaging apps became unavailable.<\/p>\n

When war broke out foreign ministry services was evacuated abroad.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe did not waste a single second on figuring out what is possible and what is impossible, because we knew all of that in advance,\u201d Kuleba said.<\/p>\n

Preparation for potential disasters might seem like a distraction from more immediate projects or even boring but making contingency plans is vital not just for Ukraine but for technologists around the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are more important projects than preparing for something that might not even happen,\u201d Kuleba advised. \u201cBut if you care for your company, if you care for your country, you have to prepare for the worst.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kuleba concluded: \u201cResilience is not being prepared to repair a destruction. Resilience is your ability to keep repairing the wrecks as destruction becomes new normal.\u201d<\/p>\n

The war has affected the operations of even smaller Ukrainian businesses as Russian cyberattacks have become stealthier.<\/p>\n

For example, Russian operatives have recently sought to gain \u201cpattern of life\u201d intelligence that might be used to assassinate Ukrainian officials or target members of their family for kidnap after hacking into the customer relationship management (CRM) systems used by businesses such as barbers, gyms, and nail bars.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat Russian security services are doing is they break into CRM systems of barbers, fitness clubs \u2026 the loyalty programmes of supermarkets, to track your movements, to understand whether you usually show up, [and] how much time do you usually spend, to build a picture, and then do what they believe is necessary,\u201d Kuleba said.<\/p>\n

In one case Kuleba linked to this tactic, the son of an unspecified Ukrainian official was kidnapped before his father was blackmailed by the Russians into leaking intel.<\/p>\n

CRM systems in the Ukraine were particularly vulnerable because for years before the invasion, \u201cRussian companies had been offering very lucrative offers to Ukrainian businesses so that they would install [their] CRM platforms,\u201d Kuleba said.<\/p>\n

Kuleba added: \u201cDid these Russian companies do that on their own initiative? Perhaps. Did the Russian security service ask them to do that and help them to do it? Perhaps. But the thing is, even such innocent programme as a check-in system at a restaurant, or a barber shop, or a gym, can help your enemy to kill someone \u2026 to kidnap.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDo not trust the products made by your potential enemy,\u201d Kuleba concluded, adding that the incident shows the importance of technological sovereignty and data security even for the smallest companies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cybersecurity professionals were offered lessons of resilience in the most extreme circumstances from Ukraine\u2019s former minister of foreign affairs. Dmytro Kuleba, who served as Ukraine\u2019s Minister of Foreign Affairs between 2020 and 2024, told Infosecurity Europe delegates that the key to Ukraine\u2019s survival after the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022 was pre-planning, a lesson learned […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":8405,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8404"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8404"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8404\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}