The historical building where the SBU has its headquarters today in Kyiv is not far from the Golden Gate monument of Kyiv, which marked the city's boundaries in the 11th century. Illia Vitiuk, the head of the cyber department at Ukraine's top counterintelligence agency. Ukraine's counterintelligence agency, the Security Service of Ukraine, divorced from its Soviet predecessor, the KGB, in the fall of 1991. Vitiuk and his team are constantly investigating and responding to Russian state hackers, and they believe they serve as a "shield to the whole Democratic world," by sharing what they learn with their allies, Vitiuk said.ĭuring a rare exclusive interview with NPR in Kyiv, Vitiuk spoke about the impact of Russian cyberattacks on Ukraine for the last decade, what it's been like defending Ukraine's critical infrastructure during the war and his plans for after the war ends. However, Ukraine's defenders have been under a near constant barrage of cyberattacks, almost 3,000 this year so far, according to Vitiuk.Ĭoupled with missiles and drone strikes, those operations have allowed Russia to weaken Ukraine's infrastructure, most concerningly the power grid, as well as steal sensitive information that supports their military campaigns. The so-called "cyber war" experts foretold in Ukraine may not have come to pass: Despite Russia's best efforts, its hackers were unable to single handedly destroy Ukraine's digital infrastructure in the early days of the war. And so we literally helped to do this with rifles."
"So we needed to take the most important databases and hardware and relocate it from Kyiv. "There was the risk of Kyiv to be surrounded," Vitiuk continued. And sometimes there were answers like, 'The system administrator is gone because his family is in Bucha and he needs to take them from Bucha,' " he recalled. We tried to contact some of the ministries and critical infrastructure. "Missiles hit Kyiv, and people were running away from here. "Just imagine what happened here on the morning of February 24," he said during an interview with NPR at the SBU's headquarters in Kyiv. 24, 2022, members of that agency - Ukraine's Security Service, or the SBU - took on another role: physically hauling important servers and technical infrastructure away from Kyiv to protect it from Russian invaders. Inspired by James Bond films and a life of adventure, he says he'd been studying all his life for this kind of work.īut on Feb. Vitiuk, the head of the cyber department at Ukraine's top counterintelligence agency, had already been battling Russian hackers and spies for years. In the first days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion into Ukraine, Illia Vitiuk and his colleagues feared the worst: the fall of Kyiv.
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