Years of Russian attacks on Ukraine’s gridīehind the scenes, US officials are often coordinating the delivery of key technology to Ukraine. The same GRU cyber-sabotage team that has cut the lights in Ukraine, after all, previously damaged computers at logistics companies in Poland that were servicing Ukraine, according to Microsoft.īut over the course of three months last winter, the Department of Energy “identified, procured and shipped” nearly 20 tons of electrical equipment to Ukraine on US Air Force cargo planes, the department said in February. US officials familiar with the Cisco project were reluctant to discuss specific shipments out of fear of tipping off Russia’s ability to thwart them. The switches worked, and Cisco ramped up production so that dozens more could get to Ukraine. “This looked like the startups in California from 1970 than some very fancy laboratory,” he said. With their offices in Kyiv partially destroyed by shelling, Vasyliv said his engineers tested the switch in a drab office in western Ukraine. The flight went to Germany before arriving in Rzeszów, Poland, a hub for humanitarian and military support about 60 miles from the Ukrainian border.įrom there, the prototypes were loaded onto a train to go into Ukraine, where they were quietly delivered to Vasyliv and his team of Ukrenergo engineers. Marshall, a former Pentagon IT contractor from Alabama, turned to a US official to find a flight that was leaving from a military base on the East Coast in April. To see whether it actually worked, Cisco had to figure out how to get them into Ukraine. Within a few weeks of the dinner in Silicon Valley, Marshall and his team had a prototype developed. “Just do your job, and do it very good,” he says he tells himself. But keeping the lights on, and avoiding the next air strike, keeps him going. Several of his colleagues have been killed during the war, Vasyliv told CNN, as the Russian military has pummeled Ukrenergo infrastructure. Otherwise, “you’re blind,” Vasyliv said in a phone interview from Kyiv. The switch allows an electric substation – which has the crucial task of converting power from high to low voltage – to communicate with other parts of a power grid. Critically, these switches needed to be outfitted with their own internal clocks that could calculate accurate time measurements, providing an element of redundancy and giving grid operators visibility even when GPS systems are down. Taras Vasyliv, who oversees power dispatching for Ukrenergo, likened the custom-built switches to a “flashlight” for a surgeon who is trying to operate in the dark. Marshall and his team of more than a dozen engineers got to work molding a very common piece of equipment, called an industrial ethernet switch, to fit the specific needs of the Ukrainian grid.Ĭisco estimated the cost of building materials and shipping of the switches to be $1 million, but the company said it donated the equipment to Ukrenergo for free. Marshall spent hours watching YouTube videos posted by an electronic-warfare expert, and also got tips from US officials and industrial cybersecurity experts at Cisco and elsewhere.Īs the world’s largest maker of computer networking equipment, Cisco had resources to spare. “Time was a factor,” he said. “These were people’s lives we were discussing here.” Marshall has spent years protecting electric power systems in Ukraine and elsewhere from sabotage, but he’d never dealt with a problem like Ukrenergo’s.Īfter dinner, Marshall went back to his hotel and racked his brain for a potential solution. Sitting at the table that night was Joe Marshall, a veteran researcher at Talos, Cisco’s cyber-intelligence unit, who listened intently as the Ukrainians explained their problem over steaks and drinks. Ukraine’s grid operators were facing a serious but underreported problem, they told their dinner companions: The constant GPS jamming that both the Russian and Ukrainian militaries use to interfere with guided missiles was also disrupting visibility for Ukraine’s power grid operators, who relied on GPS-based clocks to relay information about power flow from one location to another. Over dinner at an upscale steakhouse near Stanford University in February, Ukrenergo executives shared war stories with their contacts at Cisco, which has done business in Ukraine for years. The Pentagon handled the flights, the Department of Energy helped coordinate the equipment’s delivery, and, according to Ukrenergo, the Department of Commerce arranged crucial meetings earlier this year between a handful of US tech executives and managers with Ukrenergo who were eager for new ways to defend their grid from Russian attacks. Officials from multiple US agencies played a quiet role in getting the Cisco equipment into Ukraine, sources say.
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