Ukraine’s Experience Highlights the Need for Preparation in Cyber

https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/resilience-perseverance-ukraine/

Publish Date: 2026-06-04 05:00:00

Source Domain: www.infosecurity-magazine.com

Preparation, resilience and self-reliance are the traits that cybersecurity professionals need in the fight against cyber threats, according to former Ukrainian foreign minister.

Dmytro Kuleba, who served as Ukraine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2020 to 2024, shared several stories of wartime experience that chimed with attendees at Infosecurity Europe.

The first has a powerful message for incident responders. Kuleba cited the massive outage at telco KyivStar, which was swiftly remediated by the company after Russian hackers struck in December 2023.

“You don’t know what and how it’s going to happen, but you can practice, brainstorm, calculate and prepare so it becomes your muscle memory of how to behave in a crisis situation,” Kuleba said. “You plan, not to follow the plan but to know your environment perfectly. And to develop instincts of survival in this environment.”

Kuleba practices what he preaches and he began “strategic planning” for a possible invasion a year previously in his ministry, wargaming what would happen if employees had no access to online messaging apps.

Read more on Ukrainian cyber warfare: #Infosec2025: Good Cybersecurity Enabled Ukraine’s Surprise Attack on Russia, Says NCSC

This forward planning is essential, even if an eventual incident turns out differently to the plan, he argued.

“When [the invasion] happened, we evacuated our servers to a safe place abroad. Almost everything else we did differently [to the planned scenario] under the pressure, of circumstances” Kuleba explained.

“But we didn’t waste a single a second figuring out what was possible or impossible, because we knew all of that in advance.

“If you care for your company, you have to prepare for the worst. If it happens you will still be instinctively capable of winning even if your initial plan is ruined. If it doesn’t happen, you’ll find yourself in a stronger position.”