Written on March 9, 2022, in the second and third weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as a surge of hacktivist and nation-state cyber activity broke out on both sides. That specific event is long past. The point below, about how and why breach volume spikes the way it did that month, is not tied to it.
Itwerx is a service-disabled veteran-owned managed IT and cybersecurity provider serving businesses in Seattle, Bellevue, Everett, Lynnwood and Snohomish County, founded in 2005.
What made that month different
Every nation-state keeps a backlog of security flaws it knows about but has not disclosed or exploited, kept in reserve rather than spent. When a moment like an invasion arrives, some of that backlog gets spent all at once, aimed broadly rather than surgically. That is a different mechanism from the everyday drip of newly-discovered vulnerabilities, and it is why breach volume can spike sharply in a short window without any single new flaw explaining it.
The practical difficulty was less the number of active botnets than the number of distinct flaws suddenly in play. Security teams that were already stretched thin had to triage which new attack techniques to understand first, turning what was normally hours or days of analysis into weeks.
The part that still applies
The useful reframe from that period has outlasted it: the question for most businesses was never really “will we be breached” but “how far does it get, and how quickly is it caught.” That framing does not depend on any particular geopolitical event. Network segmentation, keeping data compartmentalized rather than in one flat pool, and layered monitoring that can catch an intrusion in hours rather than months are the same baseline recommendations today that they were during that spike – the spike just made the cost of skipping them obvious all at once.
Tools that once required an enterprise budget to deploy have kept getting more accessible to smaller organizations since. The argument for using them has not gotten weaker.
Itwerx Corp is a service-disabled veteran-owned small business providing IT services across Seattle, Bellevue, Everett and Snohomish County. This is the kind of thing our cybersecurity work deals with – talk to us about yours.
