As we spoke about in the new ThreatWise TV documentary, “People Matter: A look back on how Cisco Talos has been supporting Ukraine,” war isn’t something that often appears in an organization’s business continuity or disaster recovery plans.

In the months leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Cisco and Talos did everything we could to support our friends, partners and colleagues, who were facing a reality unlike anything that can be found in any technical training manual, SOP or SLA.

Once the invasion began, there was an influx of people across Cisco and Talos who wanted to help. That led to the development of an internal Ukraine task unit, which has become a prototype for how we can respond to future global events that are likely to have significant, ongoing cyber implications.

We also deployed and managed Cisco Secure products within a variety of Ukrainian organizations, and refocused parts of our workforce to monitor and detect threats against critical infrastructure. Much of this work continues today as part of an ongoing, comprehensive wartime effort to protect the people of Ukraine and enhance the resilience of Ukrainian organizations.

Many people have asked about our task unit, and what we do on a day-to-day basis to help organizations in Ukraine detect and respond to attacks against their critical infrastructure.

As you can probably imagine, there isn’t a typical day.

One of the key outcomes of the task unit, which has been wonderful to witness, is that people without a technical threat hunting background can add a great deal to our efforts. The power in diversity of thought and experience is explicit in our efforts to support Ukraine.

We decided to encapsulate this difficult, but important, work in the form of a graphic novel, which explores some of the themes we touched on in the documentary. Read it below or click here.

Further resources