By Ken Macon

Digital ID systems risk becoming massive vulnerabilities in the face of modern cyber threats.

Ukraine’s reliance on its new digital identity systems has become a warning about the dangers of digital ID, as a recent cyberattack exposed critical vulnerabilities in the country’s digital infrastructure.

Last month, several key government databases were taken offline, disrupting essential services like legal filings and marriage registrations. Officials assured citizens that the controversial Diia, the government’s widely used e-governance app, would soon be restored, but the incident laid bare significant risks within the app’s centralized backend platform, Trembita.

This breach, the most serious since Trembita’s launch in 2020, raises urgent questions about the security of Ukraine’s growing dependence on digital IDs and is a clear warning to other countries that are rushing to embrace the controversial tech.

Trembita, the platform enabling Diia’s operations, functions as a digital network connecting government databases. While officials insisted it operated as designed during the breach, cybersecurity experts are sounding alarms.

Mykyta Knysh, a former Ukrainian security official, described the platform’s centralized architecture as a dangerous “single point of failure.” Warnings about these risks had surfaced before — security analysts cautioned in 2021 that consolidating sensitive personal and administrative data under Diia would leave Ukraine exposed to large-scale attacks.

The Russian hacking group XakNet has claimed responsibility for the attack.
This highlights a broader danger inherent in Ukraine’s ambitious digitalization efforts, spearheaded by the Ministry of Digital Transformation under the Zelensky administration.

While consolidating government services into the smartphone-based Diia app has streamlined access for millions of citizens, the breakneck pace of implementation has left little time to address critical security gaps.

The compromised registries contained highly sensitive data, including personal addresses, family connections, and financial assets.

Beyond military implications, the breach exposes the inherent risks of digital ID systems. Security analysts have pointed out that a central repository of personal data, as seen in Ukraine’s system, creates lucrative targets for hackers. If exploited, such data could fuel identity theft, phishing campaigns, or even more devastating cyberattacks, undermining public trust in digital governance.

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

Organizers and attendees at this week’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, had to have been shocked at the new tone from the United States after four years of subservient obeisance from Joe Biden and his ineffective emissaries. In a wide-ranging speech via videoconference on Thursday, President Donald Trump essentially blew up the liberal world order consensus as it relates to the climate alarm agenda.

After putting the conference on notice that the United States would again become a sovereign nation with secure borders, Trump then turned to climate and energy policy. “I terminated the ridiculous and incredibly wasteful Green New Deal – I call it the Green New scam,” Trump began, “withdrew from the one-sided Paris climate Accord and ended the insane and costly electric vehicle mandate. We’re going to let people buy the car they want to buy.”

It was an opening salvo that flew directly in the face of remarks made earlier in the week by the likes of European Commission leader Ursula Von Der Leyen, John Kerry, Al Gore, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres and many others. But Trump was far from done.

“I declared a national energy emergency to unlock the liquid gold under our feet and pave the way for rapid approvals of new energy infrastructure,” he informed the conference, adding, “The United States has the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth, and we’re going to use it.”

The message was crystal clear: The age of America conforming its energy and climate policies to fit the strictures of the liberal world order as formulated at international climate conferences organized by the WEF and the United Nations is over, at least for the next four years and possibly beyond that. It should be obvious to everyone by now that Trump intends to completely reverse the Biden Green New Deal agenda and implement policies designed to return the U.S. to the position of what he calls “energy dominance” achieved during Trump’s first presidency.

The net-zero fantasy goal has gone completely off the rails over the last two years as both the ESG and DEI philosophies fell into disrepute. The fading of those interrelated leftwing religions led major energy companies and the banking community alike to place heavier focus on mounting and financing major energy projects designed to enhance energy and national security.

Energy reality was already making a comeback before Trump emerged triumphant in the 2024 election. Despite these and other emerging realities, the WEF’s old guard came to Davos armed with the same old rhetoric.

Sec. Gen. Guterres, always eager to engage in laughable hyperbole, labeled the oil industry a “Frankenstein monster sparing nothing and no one” as it sows what he calls “climate chaos.”

Von Der Leyen’s bombast was no less absurd: “Heat waves across Asia. Floods from Brazil to Indonesia, from Africa to Europe, wildfires in Canada, Greece and California, hurricanes in the US and the Caribbean. Climate change is still on top of the global agenda,” she warned, sounding for all the world like Bill Murray and his fellow “Ghostbusters” in the famous “dogs and cats living together – mass hysteria!” scene from the 1984 film.

Kerry was somewhat more muted, likely due to the fact that he no longer holds any official role in representing U.S. interests. Gore essentially mailed it in, delivering virtually the same hyperbole-filled remarks he spewed to the 2024 conference.

But a pair of participants in a panel discussion held Wednesday were much more realistic.

Graham Allison, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, warned his audience not to underestimate the new president. “Trump has done something no person in the world has ever done before,” he said, adding, “A dead man, a dead politician has risen. This is the greatest comeback in political history of a politician.”

Longtime political columnist Walter Russel Mead added, “We need to also factor in not only who’s won, which is Trump, but who’s lost. Which is to say, us.”

He isn’t wrong, and the elitists who make up the liberal world order would do well to pay attention. Whether they like it or not, their world has changed.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.