The Column – Cyber Security Week
Ten years is a curious unit of measurement: long enough to allow most to forget, short enough to allow a few to repeat, with the certainty that someone is listening. A few days ago, ESET, a cybersecurity company, attributed an attempted attack against Polish power plants and electricity grid to the Sandworm group, close to the Kremlin. The date is not a detail: exactly ten years earlier, with BlackEnergy, Ukraine had experienced for the first time what it means to remain in the dark not due to a fault, but due to a political decision carried out in digital form. Then it was a shock that today becomes an anniversary.
The malware changes its name, DynoWiper instead of BlackEnergy, but the gesture remains identical. Hitting energy means hitting everything you can’t see when it works: hospitals, transportation, communications, trust. Electricity is one of those infrastructures that exists especially when it is lacking. As long as they are there, they are not newsworthy; when they disappear, they reveal how naive the idea of considering them neutral was. DynoWiper, like any self-respecting wiper, does not steal information, does not ask for ransoms, does not monetize, but deletes. And resetting, in cyber space, is the functional equivalent of bombing: it’s not about making money, it’s about proving that it’s possible. From my point of view, true continuity is not technical but cultural. Ten years ago we talked about “cyber attacks” as if they were a preview of the future, today they are simply present. Cyber warfare is no longer an exception, it is a grammar. Sandworm does not innovate: it applies a lesson that the world has already seen and has chosen to archive as an episode. DynoWiper is not surprising, but remember. Remember that critical infrastructures have become the place where the relationship between power and vulnerability, between deterrence and everyday life is measured.
Then there is another aspect that deserves attention. Attacking the electricity grid of a NATO country does not just mean turning off the lights. It means testing thresholds, reaction times, attribution skills and, above all, narrative resistance. Because today war is not fought only to destroy, but to tell what can be destroyed, by whom and with what consequences. A wiper is also a message: it leaves no room for negotiation, it offers no economic returns, it does not create ambiguity, but only says: “I just want you to bend”. Here lies the paradox: the more we talk about resilience, the more fragile we discover ourselves; the more we invest in security, the more the symbolic value of hitting what should be protected increases. Ten years after BlackEnergy, DynoWiper marks not an escalation, but a normalization. The problem is not that these attacks exist, but that they no longer shock us enough to really change our perspective. Maybe the point isn’t to stop the darkness from coming, but to stop acting like it’s always an accident because, when the darkness is planned, continuing to call it a blackout is just an elegant way of not calling it war.
