It was a Saturday night last December, and Oleksii Yasinsky was sitting
on the couch with hiswife and teenage son in the living room of their
Kiev apartment. The 40-year-old Ukrainian cybersecurity researcher and
his family were an hour into Oliver Stone's film Snowden when their
building abruptly lost power."The hackers don't want us to finish
the movie," Yasinsky's wife joked. She was referring to an event
that had occurred a year earlier, a cyberattack that had cut electricity
to nearly a quarter-million Ukrainians two days before Christmas in 2015.
Yasinsky, a chief forensic analyst at a Kiev digital security firm, didn't
laugh. He looked over at a portable clock on his desk: The time was 00:00.
Precisely midnight. Yasinsky's television was plugged into a surge
protector with a battery backup, so only the flicker of images onscreen lit
the room now. The power strip started beeping plaintively. Yasinsky got up
and switched it off to save its charge, leaving the room suddenly silent.
He went to the kitchen, pulled out a handful of candles and lit them. Then
he stepped to the kitchen window. The thin, sandy-blond engineer looked out
on a view of the city as he'd never seen it before: The entire skyline
around his apartment building was dark. Only the gray glow of distant lights
reflected off the clouded sky, outlining blackened hulks of modern condos and
Soviet high-rises.Noting the precise time and the date, almost exactly a year
since the December 2015 grid attack, Yasinsky felt sure that this was no normal
blackout. He thought of the cold outside—close to zero degrees Fahrenheit—the
slowly sinking temperatures in thousands of homes, and the countdown until dead
water pumps led to frozen pipes.