Thread by @herrjemand

Six months of war. A thread about my personal experience and what I've been up to. 1/n

#war #ukraine #russia

2/ Day 0 I woke up early morning. Took my phone and saw
@meduzaproject headline "Война" - War. These five letters since then burned into my brain. This moment set a point in a my mind where past no longer exists.

3/ The first thing I did is called @bulletoleg if he is up. This was just thirty minutes after the first bombs fell on the Kyiv. thirty mile traffic jam stretched from east to the west #Kyiv. All gas stations were empty. Oleg was not able to evacuate.

@bulletoleg 4/ The next six days @bulletoleg, and his family would spend hiding in the underground car park with all their neighbours. It was freezing cold -6c/21f. Hot tea kept people warm. Some slept on the floor. Some in the cars.

rnz.co.nz/news/national/…

5/ I remember how happy @bulletoleg was having scramble eggs and sleep in their bed on the day three. It's painful to remember those days.

@bulletoleg 6/ I don't remember much about first 72hours of the war. We thankfully were in our home in Dubai, but friends, family were in Ukraine. Food shortages started. Gas supply was limited. Safety, security, backup plans, emergency rations planning. All been happing in the same time.

@bulletoleg 7/ We started organise ourselves and started working on what we could've done. My wife was working on coordinating volunteering efforts, and customs processes through our agents to get food aid into Ukraine.

8/ I started working on political action in New Zealand. Building pro-forma. Calling and emailing NZ MPs. Had a wonderful chat with @golrizghahraman on sanctions, and refugee help.

9/ Together with some activists we started #MahiForUkraine mahiforukraine.com to coordinate our actions on #Ukraine refugees, war, sanctions etc. I stayed with org for few weeks before leaving to pursue my work on helping Ukraine cybersecurity, and defending critical infra.

10/ Soon as @bulletoleg was out of the warzone, we started rebuilding @hideez. The company was in ruin. Employees scattered all over the #Ukraine. Some lost equipment. Some were sleeping in bunkers. It was a mess. We now wanted to save @hideez and help #Ukraine

@bulletoleg @hideez 11/ We understood that we are the only ones in #Ukraine that know anything about #FIDO, #phishing, #passkeys, and started working on building contacts, connections, and getting the right people on board. We had about ~400 @hideez and gave them away to the govt for free.

@bulletoleg @hideez 12/ Knowing Russia we knew that phishing would be the main vector of attack, but we did not had even clue how bad it was. One of out main critical infrastructure partners seen 600,000 attacks in just first month.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

@bulletoleg @hideez 13/ We asked @Yubico if we can haz some keys, to which, and I kid you know, they offered us TWENTY FRIGGIN THOUSAND keys, and asked where to ship. No joke. @Yubico is a scary company. Their CTO had to be stopped mutilple times from coming to Ukraine to deliver the keys.

@bulletoleg @hideez @Yubico 14/ After we sort out logistics, which was insanely hard, we got @Yubico certified for deployment in Ukrainian government. Kind of like Ukrainian FIPS.

15/ All #Yubikeys are officially imported, signed, as humanitarian aid. And all are given for free to Ukrainian government with help to integrate them. So far we've integrated 15,000 #Yubikeys in Ukraine. And we still have 15,000 thanks to another 10,000 that @Yubico gave us.

@Yubico 16/ March-April I spent in Sweden working with @Yubico team on deployment, logistics, messaging, PR, etc. We developed a whole Ukrainian language documentation on deploying #FIDO, setting up #MFA, configuring your accounts, @Microsoft, @Google, @Yubico docs in Ukrainian.

@Yubico @Microsoft @Google 17/ This was a good time to reflect on the madness, and embrace Swedish nature. Support from my Swedish friend really helped, but still these were dark time. I remember waking up and reading about #Bucha, and seeing photos. I cried so badly my wife drugged me up for two days.

@Yubico @Microsoft @Google 18/ This is when I realised that my people became #fascists.

herrjemand.medium.com/my-people-9c19…

19/ Every day on this war you think you've seen everything. Death, destruction. We in Ukraine see actual photos from war. Photos so bad you can't blur them. Pieces of human bodies. Disembodied, twisted, burned bodies. My age. Younger. Insane.

20/ Every day you see some new madness, and watch as dig deeper down the madness hole. Hard to watch. Impossible to turn away.

21/ #mentalhealth really deteriorated. Before the war I just finished recovering from mental health crisis and death anxiety. Now I just feel like my head is filled with rotting corpses. I guess another 10k on therapy? *)

22/ #mentalhealth in general is a big topic for me as I see people loosing their mind from stress. Three most important things you need to know about #mentalhealth in crisis:

1. Look after yourself
2. Live. Don't exist. Embrace life. Enjoy.
3. Seek assistance. We all need help

23/ #mentalhealth is #health. If you don't treat your wound, it gets infected. If you don't treat your stress, anxiety, depression, they get bad. You fall into the darkest places. Look after yourself and after your loved ones. Look after your #mentalhealth and physical #health

24/ After Sweden I traveled to US, Canada, EU, UK, before coming back to Dubai for a short time. First time in two months I was home in my bed, eating my food, and sitting on my couch. That was a joyful feeling I can not describe.

25/ With the war our apartment became cursed. First month the woke up, made breakfast, watched news, worked, lunch, watched new, dinner, news. War buffet.

Coming back after two months away we suddenly fell in love with out things again. Was good to fall in our bed.

26/ I did not stop on working with @hideez, as we continued talking, working, building new messaging. Deploying, educating, training, etc.

@hideez 26/ Before we go forward I want to talk about what I actually do @hideez. What the heck if "VP of War Strategy". It sounds like I am plotting vectors for bombing russian positions.

@hideez 27/ My job is simply that: Hideez can not fail. Period. Helping them with product. Building messaging. Supporting team. Raising funds. Finding equipment. Helping manage day-to-day operations.

Functionally I help @bulletoleg run @hideez for the time of the war.

@hideez @bulletoleg 28/ I am not being paid. It's just happens that
@hideez are the only real #FIDO company in Ukraine with actual product, and actual experience. So there is no better company to find to fight this #cyberwar with, and I wanted to help.

@hideez @bulletoleg 29/ Short stay in Dubai ended with me going to @Identiverse and presenting about war in Ukraine. It was great to catchup with all the friends whom I did not see for many years because of pandemic. Big thanks to @4thibeau and @_nat for inviting.

scmagazine.com/analysis/ident…

30/ And first time since the war I travel to #Ukraine. But that is the story for the morning. It's 2am. Everyone have a safe days and good night.

31/ Just I wrote last tweet, thirty seconds later #air #sirens started. Hey @Russia go to bed... actually... how about taking your soldiers back to russia as well?

@bulletoleg @hideez @Yubico P.S. I mean scary, as in if you give them a chance they might parachute right into your office and start integrating phishing resistant authentication everywhere. Watch out cause #phishing wont survive *)