He heard the voice of Lieutenant General Mikhail Chayko, the Commander of the 1st Tank Army and the ground force commander for Russian Forces in the Ukraine, on the other end. “General Nikolaev, my forces stand ready to execute Red Storm,” he announced excitedly. “We will remind the Americans and NATO that Russia is not be pushed around.”
“Acknowledged, General Chayko.” Nikolaev felt that the excitement was a bit misplaced; he was not convinced that Russia would come out ahead. However, he dared not utter even a syllable of dissent.
Chayko’s voice suddenly dropped lower and became much more serious. “Please ensure we have the required air support so that my armor units have a chance,” he requested.
“Understood, General Chayko. We will do what we can to support your troops,” General Nikolaev replied. He liked Chayko. He was probably their most capable military commander, which is why he promoted him to take over command of the 1st Tank Army and all ground units in Ukraine.
As he concluded his conversation with Chayko, Nikolaev reflected on the situation. “Well, the US and NATO did bring this on themselves. They promised at the end of the Cold War not to expand their borders further east, and now they are walking all the way up to the Russian border. They routinely fly surveillance flights along our border, as if they have the right to interfere in our affairs. Now the US demands that we withdraw from Eastern Ukraine, despite the election results… I guess it’s time for them to be taught a lesson. The Russian bear still has teeth and claws.”
“Do they realize that Petrov will not back down this time?” he wondered. “He has directed us to hit the Americans hard and fast; he wants us to bloody them quickly and then force them to withdraw from Ukraine. If our missions succeed, then the only ceasefire they will achieve will be when Moscow has secured all of Ukraine as compensation.”
Colonel Alexei Semenov, the ground force commander of the Pyryatyn region, had arrived the night before with the new Armatas. So far, he was impressed with what he saw. The unit commanders had their men and equipment ready for war; all they needed was to be given the order to attack, and he had finally received the directive to strike the NATO positions.
He found his executive officer and took him aside. “Comrade, our glorious leader has given us the order. We are to attack immediately.”
Colonel Semenov felt a certain satisfaction as the words came out of his mouth. “There, I have done it. I’ve just issued the first combat order of what should be a short and victorious war.”
A sergeant walked into the house that was being used as a command post; he made a beeline for Major Lavra and whispered something into his ear. A moment later, Major Lavra was getting the attention of Colonel Semenov. “Sir,” he said, “we’ve just received word that one of our scouts spotted a Ukrainian armored unit moving towards the demarcation line.
He pointed to a location on the map board that was about twenty or so miles from their current location.
Colonel Semenov studied the map board, trying to determine whether or not they could destroy the enemy by the end of the day. Then he grunted, and turned to Major Lavra. “Have you spoken with our air force liaison officer yet about our air cover?”
Major Lavra nodded. “I just spoke with the air force LNO, and he said they are initiating their air attack shortly.”
Lavra put his hand up as if he had suddenly just remembered something important. “Also, I just received word that some of our soldiers spotted a small reconnaissance drone flying over our area, maybe twenty minutes ago. Some of the soldiers are doing their best to follow the drone back to wherever it originated from. It was a small infantry style scout drone, which means there must be an American or NATO unit operating very close to our position right now.” Major Lavra may have delayed telling Semenov about this unfortunate bit of news because he was concerned that they may have been discovered before they could launch their own operation.
Colonel Semenov just nodded with a slight smile. “Get our helicopters heading towards that Ukrainian armor unit. I also want you to dispatch one of the companies to track that American unit down and destroy them. We have to assume that the Americans know we are here, and now they know how many tanks and troops we have. We must move quickly now, before they can react to us.” He was frustrated that the Americans may already know his intentions before he had a chance to act, but if they moved quickly, he could possibly still catch them unprepared.
In the fall of 2016, a group of Russian hackers operating out of Belarus, codename Marten, tested out a botnet attack on Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Modern technology had brought many marvels, such as turning on lighting from a cell phone, starting cars remotely, or monitoring closed circuit security footage 24/7, but each of these network-enabled items posed a potential opening for the hackers to exploit. Marten found a backdoor to utilize this weakness, and hit a French-based hosting provider named OVH with a record-breaking Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, flooding the network with over one terabit of data per second (1 Tbps.). The botnet attack was more successful than they had hoped, shutting down large portions of the internet for a short time. The plans for a more formalized Operation Redworm had been born.
A year later, on a quiet Sunday morning in September, the head of Marten received a message from the Kremlin. He alerted all of his team members, bellowing, “Operation Redworm is a go! This is not a drill. It’s time to sow as much chaos as possible. Get to work!”
The clicking of keys in the room immediately drowned out all other noise. They began scanning the web for unsecured IoT devices, and quickly hit pay dirt. The internet was covered with a plethora of IoT devices (printers, heating/cooling systems, vehicle dashboard systems, household appliances, etc.) that had not received regular patch updates to their security. Marten indiscriminately began taking control of these devices. Within 24 hours, they had collected a botnet army of nearly 18 million devices. One of the members broke the botnets down into smaller attack groups, so that they could create a series of attack waves. This would make it significantly harder for the US and NATO to respond when they eventually figured out what was happening to their IT infrastructure.
With botnet army ready, Marten launched the first series of attacks. The first attack hit a group of internet service providers in the EU, UK, and US with an IoT botnet DDoS attack that was nearly 1 Tbps strong. The bandwidth that was syphoned away through this attack reached unheard of levels, degrading the performance of the internet in those regions to the point of making it unusable in those regions. Next, they infiltrated individual service providers servers, summarily locking them out using a crypto-locker tool they had developed.
With phases one and two of Operation Redworm complete, Marten turned to an assault on the power grids in Poland, Ukraine, and Germany. The goal of that particular attack was not to destroy these power grids to the point of creating an unrecoverable blackout situation; rather, they simply wanted to take them offline for the first few hours of armed conflict, throwing the US and NATO forces into chaos just as they were trying to organize a resistance.
While the attacks against the internet service providers and power grids were happening, a separate assault was launched against the US and NATO satellite systems. They attacked the Industrial Control Systems (ICSs) within hundreds of GPS satellites, causing them to burn out. Within minutes, the Russians had effectively destroyed the globe’s entire GPS satellite system (or at least, any GPS that was being accessed by the enemies of Russia).