The best gift I've ever received has to be a bike when I was younger, a pedal bike.

It was a sort of slick little road bike and I remember it was all like, it was so, it was all wrapped up,

it was so obvious what it was obviously because nothing's shaped like a bike and I had a little ribbon on it and I was so

a guest. For that was a life changer and I'm still sort of big on cycling around my area now so, for that one change really low.

Enjoy in every sip with red cups now back at Starbucks.

Back in 2016, Andy Greenberg's editors at Wired wanted him to write a story about cyber war.

Their initial pitch was inspired by US politics.

They were thinking about the Russian interference in the 2016 election, which I didn't really see as cyber war at all.

Andy's definition is more malevolent.

Cyber war to me is a campaign of cyber attacks with disruptive or destructive effects carried out by one state against an enemy state or its adversary and often in the midst of an actual war.

So I went looking for the real cyber war story and I found it in Ukraine.

For the past six years, Andy has reported on the ongoing cyber campaign against Ukraine. The hacks that have disabled power plants, frozen government agencies and paralyzed hospitals and the Russian military unit behind it all.

On Thursday morning, as Russia officially invaded Ukraine, we called him up to try to understand the parallel digital war that's taking place alongside the physical one.

There are cyber attacks that are definitely happening now and have been happening for weeks prior to this actual physical reinvasion of Ukraine.

And I think it's really important to preface anything I say about cyber attacks at this moment, like a kind of caveat that they just don't matter as much as the actual physical attacks with mortars and bullets and fighter jets and helicopters that are truly killing people.

And putting many more people's lives at risk, but it's still it still matters.

Since January, government networks have been attacked, so have banks and the military.

And then yesterday we saw reports of Wiper malware again hitting Ukrainian targets this time hundreds of computers.

We don't know how many networks.

The malware seems to destroy everything it hits. It's a digital playbook that looks awfully familiar to one that Russia has run before with terrible consequences.

Today on the show, Andy walks us through the war in Ukraine that you can't see, one that started years ago and is still happening.

I'm Lizzie O'Leary and you're listening to What Next TBD, a show about technology, power and how the future will be determined. Stick around.

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