Russia struggles under unprecedented wave of hacking attacks

[poochyena]

Summary

 

Experts anticipated a Moscow-led cyber-assault; instead, unprecedented attacks by hacktivists and criminals have wreaked havoc in Russia

 

Quotes

Quote

Digital assailants have plundered the country’s personal financial data, defaced websites and handed decades of government emails to anti-secrecy activists abroad. One recent survey showed more passwords and other sensitive data from Russia were dumped onto the open Web in March than information from any other country.

The published documents include a cache from a regional office of media regulator Roskomnadzor that revealed the topics its analysts were most concerned about on social media — including antimilitarism and drug legalization — and that it was filing reports to the FSB federal intelligence service, which has been arresting some who complain about government policies.
 

A separate hoard from VGTRK, or All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Co., exposed 20 years of emails from the state-owned media chain and is “a big one” in expected impact, said a researcher at cybersecurity firm Recorded Future who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss his work on dangerous hacking circles.

Quote

Painter warned that Russia still has offensive capabilities, and U.S. officials have urged organizations to prepare for an expected Russian cyber-assault, perhaps held to be deployed in a moment of maximum leverage.
 

But perhaps the most important victim of the wave of attacks has been the myth of Russian cyber-superiority, which for decades helped scare hackers in other countries — as well as criminals within its borders — away from targeting a nation with such a formidable operation.
 

“The sense that Russia is off-limits has somewhat expired, and hacktivism is one of the most accessible forms of striking at an unjust regime or its supporting infrastructure,” said Emma Best, co-founder of Distributed Denial of Secrets, which validated and published the regulator and broadcast troves among others.

Ordinary criminals with no ideological stake in the conflict have also gotten in on the act, taking advantage of preoccupied security teams to grab money as the aura of invincibility falls, researchers said.

 

My thoughts

I've been waiting for this. Modern warfare has to include large scale cyber attacks and it seems like Russia, despite being seen as a hacking superpower, is losing the cyber war very badly and has taken very little hacking offensives. Hundreds of GB of data from Russian databases have been hacked and it seems the bigger issue is actually sorting through all the data than the actual hacking. Its practically a free pass to hack russian government sites right now with little to no chance of retaliation. I honestly expected a lot more from Russia involving cyber attacks during the war, but I guess not.

 

Sources

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/05/01/russia-cyber-attacks-hacking/

[LiamApex]

**gets a padlock for my 1999 computer case just to be safe""

[lewdicrous]

1 minute ago, LiamApex said:

**gets a padlock for my 1999 computer case just to be safe""

"A click out of 1, nothing from 2...."

[LiamApex]

Just now, lewdicrous said:

"A click out of 1, nothing from 2...."

3 is binding... nothing on 4... 

[poochyena]

2 minutes ago, LiamApex said:

**gets a padlock for my 1999 computer case just to be safe""

All you need to do is connect a usb to an infected computer, like the computer at an office or library, and then connect it to your old non-internet connect computer, and then the hacker's virus can cause destruction. Even computers thrown into the trash or recycling can be re-constructed from the landfill and data read off it. No computer is safe

[FliP0x]

3 minutes ago, poochyena said:

No computer is safe

Unless you burn it with fire.

[Middcore]

Well, well, well... how the turntables...

[Zodiark1593]

24 minutes ago, Caroline said:

Get one ith a disc detainer core so the hackers will have rotate all these discs as far clockwise as they will go... and then tension off disc number one

Need a pretty specific tool for that job. The tool that Someone, and Someone Else made, if I recall. 

[da na]

31 minutes ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Need a pretty specific tool for that job. The tool that Someone, and Someone Else made, if I recall. 

The Haxx0r decoder tool, available on covertinstruments.com

[da na]

1 hour ago, LiamApex said:

**gets a padlock for my 1999 computer case just to be safe""

*locks HP z620 workstation case with the same key they've used since 1980*

No one can get me now

[OhioYJ]

35 minutes ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Need a pretty specific tool for that job.

Not a fluke.

[Zodiark1593]

41 minutes ago, Caroline said:

Yes it's said one of them used to live in Bosnia not so long ago.

In any case, that's all I had for you today, if you do have any questions or comments about this please put them below.

The new additions to the most popular brand of locks are said to be 50% faster to open. Almost like they’re made of plaster inside. 

[Quackers101]

When you got Nato that has a lot of nations, including israel, silicon valley and more. it's going to be wild.

Hopefully the war is costing too much, and at least resolve this madness. (while this could be too political, but also a bit on topic?)

[jagdtigger]

Seems like a certain youtuber is pretty popular here....

[Salv8 (sam)]

shit this is a big one.

 

hopefully this enture debacle will teach leaders that if you go to war with another country, more then just that country and its friends will fight back.

now the common man can fight in the war and with enough determination, do some serious damage.

 

this is a turning point in our society that can never be un-done.

[poochyena]

53 minutes ago, Salv8 (sam) said:

shit this is a big one.

 

hopefully this enture debacle will teach leaders that if you go to war with another country, more then just that country and its friends will fight back.

now the common man can fight in the war and with enough determination, do some serious damage.

 

this is a turning point in our society that can never be un-done.

Something your comment reminded me too; With cyber warfare, its the entire country who can experience the damage. Its not just the rich and old sending off the poor and young to become casualties. The rich elites have a LOT more to lose through targeted hacking. They can't just sit back and relax in their mansions, they have to worry about their financial and personal life becoming hacking targets.

[Taf the Ghost]

I do like that LPL is popular with the LTT set. Which isn't surprising, I'm pretty sure it ended up in my recommended after a LTT video.

 

As for the article, well, the WaPo is a popular front for information the US Sate Department wants out there. The information listed is generally uninteresting and this seems more like AgitProp (and a bit perfunctory) than all that much of interest. Soft targets that were always there simply got compressed. If something on the scale of the 2015 OPM hack was made public (and we got the data), that might be interesting. But: no infrastructure is down. This really isn't anything much.

[williamcll]

Good hacking sometimes requires good hardware, something that Russia lacks.

 

Let this be a lesson for all network security.

[leadeater]

46 minutes ago, williamcll said:

Good hacking sometimes requires good hardware, something that Russia lacks.

 

Let this be a lesson for all network security.

 

What you you mean? This is cutting edge technology, the cable is made of fiber(s).

[MageTank]

20 hours ago, lewdicrous said:

"A click out of 1, nothing from 2...."

 

20 hours ago, LiamApex said:

3 is binding... nothing on 4... 

 

[Sauron]

Predictable, there are just a lot more people who are angry with the Russian government than there are Russian government hackers and a lot fewer potential targets for them.

15 hours ago, Salv8 (sam) said:

now the common man can fight in the war and with enough determination, do some serious damage.

Plus given the situation they can probably do it with relative impunity even if they are found out.

[Quackers101]

5 hours ago, leadeater said:

What you you mean? This is cutting edge technology, the cable is made of fiber(s).

if no other people use it and they can't cut the wire? best tech yet!

[WolframaticAlpha]

This reminds me of: https://www.wired.com/story/north-korea-hacker-internet-outage/amp

 

In brief, guy got hacked by Korean hackers. Government agencies don't respond to his requests. He decides to counter hack.

Quote

[...] was just one victim of a hacking campaign that targeted Western security researchers with the apparent aim of stealing their hacking tools and details about software vulnerabilities. He says he managed to prevent those hackers from swiping anything of value from him. But he nonetheless felt deeply unnerved by state-sponsored hackers targeting him personally—and by the lack of any visible response from the US government

 

[poochyena]

7 hours ago, Taf the Ghost said:

As for the article, well, the WaPo is a popular front for information the US Sate Department wants out there. The information listed is generally uninteresting and this seems more like AgitProp (and a bit perfunctory) than all that much of interest.

Vice did a similar video too. Yea, its nothing crazy like hackers getting into Putin's bank account and draining all his funds, but this is certainly a shift in warfare not seen before. Its the start of a new age. Also, like mentioned earlier, there is a LOT of data that has been hacked. It will take time for people to go through it all to potentially use the stolen data for something useful. This is only the start, it can only get worse. This is a warning of what could come to other countries if war were to break out.

 

9 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Predictable, there are just a lot more people who are angry with the Russian government than there are Russian government hackers and a lot fewer potential targets for them.

Its not even just that; completely politically neutral people are joining in simply due to the ease of access and lack of punishment for doing so.

[poochyena]

34 minutes ago, Caroline said:

There's no such thing as "politically neutral people", they're supporting one of the sides while attacking the other, not that complicated.

Maybe I should rephrase? Their hacking are politically neutral. Some hacking russian sites are just in it for the money, not for political gain. Russia is possibly the most valuable hacking target right now in regards to the risk : reward ratio. Secret Russian documents will sell for a lot more than that of most other countries, but the countries like the US or china has far greater risk from stealing such information.