The FBI warned five U.S. energy companies in mid-March that computers using Russian internet addresses had been scanning their networks, in a possible prelude to bigger cyberattacks. Top U.S. cybersecurity officials have warned that Russia is looking to conduct disruptive or destructive digital attacks, as opposed to conducting routine espionage…

Most companies have been preparing for a range of scenarios for years that Russia could roll out, including denial of service attacks to shut down networks by flooding them with traffic, defacement of government and corporate websites, or ransomware attacks that seize and lock down servers until their operators cough up cash, like the 2021 attack that knocked out the Colonial pipeline in the southeastern United States for nearly a week.

But experts believe that Russia doesn’t have to use digital attacks that harm physical infrastructure in the United States and elsewhere to cause problems. Biasini said that Russia had learned from the Colonial pipeline attack that it could cause chaos by simply hacking into the enterprise software that underlies energy companies, instead of taking more destructive and sophisticated cyberattacks that render equipment inoperable.