Ukraine uses 30,000 physical security keys to protect the Delta combat system from cyber attacks

Dmytro Dzhugalyk Author of news on Mezha.Media. I write about what I am actively interested in, namely technology, games and cinema.

After the start of a full-scale war, Ukraine began to use the digital combat control system “Delta”. It works at all levels of the Armed Forces, but is often targeted by Russian hackers. To increase security, physical keys have been introduced for logging into the system – about 30,000 of them have already been issued, writes Bloomberg

According to the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, the system can automatically recognize enemy equipment using artificial intelligence and is connected to drone control systems. The more actively it was used, the more it became a target for Russian hackers. AI also helps detect and flag suspicious systems.

Oleg Naumenko, the head of the Hideez cyber security company, reported back in April 2022 that to increase the security of “Delta” they are introducing 10,000 free physical keys – portable devices that add an additional level of protection when logging into the system.

Naumenko announced this week that by 2025, 30,000 keys have already been deployed, of which 22,000 are used exclusively for military purposes. These devices, known as YubiKeys, are provided by Yubico Inc. of California and distributed by Hideez.

Naumenko says that such keys “solve many problems”. If you use them instead of passwords, the risk of phishing attacks disappears. Security keys work on the basis of public key cryptography: during authentication, information from the chip is compared with data on online servers. Unlike regular login credentials, which can be stolen, these keys are much more difficult to crack.