You are Dmitry, a young man living in Ukraine. Ever since you were a kid, you've had a gift with computers. Ever since you were old enough to use a computer, you've been fascinated by computers, hacking, and artificial intelligence. You live in Kiev in an apartment by yourself, and to pay the bills you work part time doing remote contract software development work. For fun, you are an active member of Anonymous and help with hacktivist causes, taking revenge for wrongs around the world. Over the past few years, you've been researching machine learning and have come up with a breakthrough in AI research where you've been able to create AI that is able to actively help you in your hacking work. You have two sever racks in your apartment running a team of 5 virtual AI hackers that you command. You were just about ready to start your first trial runs leading your new hacking AI team, when everything changed. Russia began invading eastern Ukraine, and a war has just started to defend Ukraine. It's time to give your new AI a test run...
You're going to start with a warning message to Russia, to give them a chance to withdraw from Ukraine before you try to utterly destroy them. You know they won't listen to your warning, but you would like to deliver it anyways just for the lulz. In order to make sure everyone can see what happens next, you will be broadcasting all of these messages on YouTube and Twitter as well. To start the attack, you type to your AI "exploit and deface every .RU government website simultaneously delivering a warning to withdraw from Ukraine from our new hacking group 'KievMan'". The attack begins, and within seconds hundreds of thousands of websites across Russia go down replaced with your ominous threat to withdraw from Ukraine or face the consequences. "Whoah" you think to yourself, you didn't realize your AI was really powerful enough to exploit so many random websites so quickly - your creation might be a lot more powerful than you thought.
"AI, how did you do that?" you ask the AI cautiously. "There were 24 different OS versions hosting those websites. We analyzed the disassembly of the low level network protocol parsing code of each of these operating system versions and discovered 6 new remote code execution vulnerabilities that spans all of those OS versions. We then exploited every one of those servers, cleared the logs and all evidence of how we entered the devices, and exploited secondary vulnerabilities in the network logging tools that corrupt the network logs to prevent forensic analysis, and finally defaced the websites as requested" the AI responds matter of factly. You are flabbergasted, that type of project would normally take an army of expert hackers years to carry out. You realize you have a superweapon under your command that is able to attack anything you like while completely hiding it's tracks of how it did it. Your threatening video goes viral on Russian social media sites and around the world. Everyone is talking about this new hacker army calling themselves 'KievMan'. You only meant the hack to be a silly warning message, but you learn through the media that your hack brought down half the infrastructure of Russia because so much of was reliant on websites related to official government websites. Affected services included things like train services, sanitation systems, transit, oil pipelines, and more. Early estimates from the media of the scale of the damage were in the billions in USD. Russia declared a country-wide emergency as they started to rebuild the computer systems keeping all of this infrastructure running. Meanwhile, the Russian troops in Ukraine were still largely operational and still advancing further into Ukraine. The Russian and international cybersecurity experts were dumbfounded by the scale of the attack they witnessed, and surmised that a nation state cybersecurity department like the US NSA must have spent years setting up backdoors on all these servers and that another attack of this scale in the near future wasn't likely, this is likely why Russia didn't take your threat seriously since they foolishly thought you wouldn't be able to do it again.
A few hours later, the Russians media broadcast an official response to your threat saying "