The recent Russian cyberattack on Ukraine’s railway infrastructure demonstrates a fundamental security principle: distributed, open systems consistently prove more resilient than centralized, closed ones. This principle, though counterintuitive for some, has profound implications for how we should design critical infrastructure in an era of increasing cyber threats.

Transportation efficiency studies across Europe provide compelling evidence for this principle in practice:

1. London and Paris focus on constant access proofs through physical and digital barriers, creating an easily broken “prevention” system overly-dependent on vendors building ever more expensive micro-movement taxation systems.
2. Berlin’s model accepts “open door” access for system resilience and maximized throughput for low cost and high gain, based on “detection and enforcement” approaches that prioritize operational continuity.

The results speak for themselves:

• Berlin’s system moves approximately 20-25% more passengers per hour during peak times due to fewer bottlenecks.
• Berlin’s infrastructure costs are estimated to be 30-40% lower due to reduced need for physical barriers and monitoring systems.
• The ROI is compelling from both economic and security perspectives.

Berlin’s distributed system principles mirror exactly what helped Ukraine’s railway system withstand a recent cyberattack, as reported by Reuters:

Blaming the cyberattack on the “enemy”, shorthand usually used by Kyiv to mean Russia, officials said rail travel had not been affected but that work was still under way to restore the online ticketing system more than 24 hours after the hack. An outage was first reported on Sunday when the rail company notified passengers about a failure in its IT system and told them to buy tickets on-site or on trains. “The latest attack was very systemic, unusual and multi-level,” rail company Ukrzaliznytsia wrote on the Telegram app.

By maintaining operational flow while ticketing availability was compromised, they exhibited resilience through distributed and redundant systems:

Oleksandr Pertsovskyi, Ukrzaliznytsia’s board chairman, said on national television that the company had handled the fallout from the attack well. “Operational traffic did not stop for a single moment. The enemy attack was aimed at stopping trains, but we quickly switched to backup systems.”

This successful response demonstrates that if they issued high-volume, low-cost monthly tickets, these attacks would be even less effective. This pattern follows documented precedents of attackers focusing on authentication systems—from the 2016 Ukrainian Power Grid credential theft to the alleged 2025 Oracle Cloud Access Manager compromise.

The Russian approach to the Ukrainian railway reveals tactical limitations that explain its ineffectiveness. Their persistent focus on centralized authentication points rather than adapting to counter distributed security models represents a strategic vulnerability, similar to deploying conventional forces against highly mobile, asymmetric defenders.

Russia’s unchanging focus remains on:

1. Seeing freedom of movement as a function of individuals requiring tickets through centrally-controlled checkpoints rather than actual trusted privilege and distributed authority
2. Believing a psychological impact comes from impatience in a perceived service degradation, rather than actual kinetic harms

This approach parallels historical military failures against asymmetric opponents, similar to how Ukrainian mobile units have proven effective against Russian armored columns—echoing the British information warfare methods documented in their WWI Gaza/Beersheba campaign.

What makes the Russian attack significant isn’t the technical sophistication but how it puts London, Paris, and NYC on notice for having similar strategic weaknesses—the more authoritarian the model of civilian movement, the more vulnerable to attacks by foreign authoritarian adversaries.

The successful Ukrainian response offers three critical lessons for anyone designing data storage and identity management systems:

• Distributed Resilience: Operations continued despite authentication compromise
• Manual Fallbacks: Ticket issuance shifted to in-person
• Open Standards: Less dependency on proprietary authentication

This pattern of breaching systems through authentication vulnerabilities reveals predictable tactics that demand a new approach. The days of “lockout after three tries” and other simplistic Microsoft “Domain” approaches to security are clearly obsolete in today’s identity threat landscape.

Evolution of defense requires a fundamental return to first-principles of security architecture, moving away from centralized prevention toward distributed detection and resilience. Authentication systems should be designed with the assumption of compromise and logical resilience rather than the illusion of impenetrability—similar to how the 1970s “Inter-net” was designed with open protocols that could survive targeted Soviet threats.

This is the reality of modern information technology operations: authentication isn’t just another service to protect—it’s a primary battlefield that demands openness and interoperability as survival mechanisms.

Centralized systems built without distributed concepts are like a modern bridge made of poorly guarded chains instead of superior engineering in braided inexpensive wires, where any single expensive link would cause catastrophic system failure.