About Russian hackers and cyberwar

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The well-known Russian entrepreneur and expert in the field of information technology Igor Ashmanov in an interview with the MIR 24 TV channel spoke about Russian hackers, cyber wars and the Shaltai-Boltai case.

The Internet today stores our passport data, information about credit cards, accounts, gigabytes of personal correspondence. How well is it all protected?

Not at all, of course. In general, credit card protection is another story. Much more important things are stored there, namely opinions, social multiples of people with each other, so-called big user data about everything that a person does. This is much more sensitive information than just credit card numbers. Most people have nothing to take. If half of your salary is stolen from your credit card, this is certainly unpleasant, but a person can be reached in a thousand other ways and cause much more harm, knowing what he thinks, with whom he communicates, etc.

In the films, the work of hackers is depicted very conditionally - he sits in front of a laptop, does some manipulations and immediately breaks into the Pentagon. How is it really happening? How difficult is this process?

In Hollywood, they generally show how a hacker breaks into the screen and then navigates through the glowing tunnels. Hacking is special programming. People sit at night and try to use a huge number of tools to crack passwords or servers. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. They also have red eyes, etc. That is, this is ordinary programming, only with a criminal bias. Therefore, of course, there is no such thing for someone to run in for a second and open the servers of the Pentagon or the FSB. In addition, most of these things generally cannot be done without an insider. That is, you need an insider or some information about what the system administrator, whose password you want to break, likes, or what he uses, what holes are in the software that he uses. One must constantly keep an eye out, read about vulnerabilities that are announced in a million places, etc. This is a very highly skilled hard work that is done by people with more or less criminal consciousness.

Thanks to hackers, the famous meme "The Russians did it" appeared on the Internet. That is, let's say, a photo of a dog against the background of a spaced apart room and below the signature “The Russians did it”. Behind these comic accusations are statements by American politicians that our hackers somehow influenced the presidential campaign. How substantiated are these accusations?

The topic about Russian hackers is a purely media phenomenon. Whether there are any hackers there is generally unknown. This whole story with the autopsy about the Democratic Party, how they distorted and substituted Clinton for Sanders inside, did not appear at all as a result of an autopsy. If you remember that both people from hacker circles and Julian Assange directly said that this was the result of a leak - an insider came and brought this data. There was no need to open anything there. That is, it is clear that this whole story about Clinton was meaningless.

What hackers can and cannot? After all, these people are often spoken of as omnipotent …

There are commercial hackers who make money online - this is a huge industry with a very detailed division of labor. She is about 25 years old. Someone picks up addresses, someone writes programs to hijack computers, someone builds botnets from a million of captured computers and leases them, someone rents these servers and arranges attacks or password cracking or distribution of fake banking applications and then steals money, someone separately steals credit card numbers and also trades them for those who cash out. These are all different groupings. There is a very complicated world, these are people who do criminal business and earn money. There are no omnipotent ones among them. When they talk about Russian or American hackers who hacked something, intervened in elections, etc., we are talking about cyber troops - hackers who are in the service of the state. The most famous example of war viruses is Stuxnet, which burned about a third of Iran's uranium enrichment centrifuges. It was a long story, it is always an operation to inject a virus. The virus itself was introduced into controllers at a plant in Germany and only then hit the centrifuges. There was an attempt to cover the story with a veil of a complex legend that the virus came from a computer that was accidentally connected to the Internet. In fact, it was not like that, it was done by the special services. Then the secret services of the United States and Israel admitted that it was, indeed, their operation. It was so loud that they wanted to appropriate some kind of fame for themselves. It was a military state virus. That is a completely different story. Government hackers likely have very little overlap with commercial cybercriminals.

That is, cyber war is not fiction, but already reality, and such battles, invisible to the layman, are going on with might and main?

Certainly. Even if we were not talking about the Internet, then decryption, for example, never stopped at all. This is also a cyber war - an attempt to break ciphers, intercept messages. The same specialists in decryption work there, professional mathematicians, with the help of computers. That is, these wars never stop. It must be understood that a direct operation to destroy the critical information infrastructure, to attack it, will be perceived as an act of war. No one is doing this between countries such as Russia and the United States. If you do this, it will be obvious who is behind this and some kind of reaction will follow. Moreover, as we know, the Americans announced this summer that they want to equate a cyberattack with an act of war in order to be able to respond to a cyberattack immediately with conventional weapons.

Now the story with the Humpty Dumpty group is heard. They managed to get the correspondence of the first persons of the state. Is this not a confirmation of the thesis that firms and government agencies sometimes do not take a very responsible attitude to cybersecurity?

That's true, but I don't think the Humpty Dumpty members have demonstrated personal qualifications. This is nonsense, it cannot be so. I absolutely do not believe in the story that someone is sitting in a cafe and hacking into the smartphone of a passing deputy prime minister or presidential aide, this is nonsense. This kind of thing is always done with insiders. In fact, in such a situation, "Humpty Dumpty" is not a hacker group, but a cistern, a place for publications. Since the very legend of the ubiquitous hackers - and WikiLeaks refers to this legend - has already been promoted, nothing prevents the creation of virtual hacker groups and throwing in (information) through them, although there may not be anything behind them at all. A certain facade - Anonymous, Humpty Dumpty - they are simply "leaked" by those who have them.

Is it a real story that a company is careless about cyber security and loses everything as a result of an attack?

Of course it's real. Most are very careless. There are examples - these are banks from which huge amounts of money are now being stolen. Banks very often hide these circumstances because the only thing they sell is trust. Therefore, banks cannot talk about the fact that his money was stolen. Credit card data is stolen, leaks occur from the inside … 80-90% of all information security problems are employees, not external hackers. This must be understood. The simplest example: if you build a security perimeter, but at the same time any employee can bring a smartphone with him to the office and leak. Either copy the data to the device, or shoot some important document. The cost of leaked banking data in the world is tens of billions of dollars annually. Not to mention hacks.

Where is the line between freedom on the Internet and the desire of the state to regulate it in order to prevent cybercrime?

I cannot give an exact answer to this question, because we are not in a situation where there are some norms, even international ones, or there is someone to spy on. We are moving quite energetically from a situation when there was absolute freedom on the Internet, which is called lawlessness, and it seemed that it would always be so, when the laws that operate in everyday life did not operate on the Internet, to a state when all this would be regulated. In the end, the Internet should have laws that work in everyday life. Relatively speaking, threats, especially in front of witnesses, are criminally punishable; threats and insults on the Internet can be completely unpunished. Everything will be more or less aligned. But where this border will be, we do not know. We have examples of a completely "regulated" Internet - in Vietnam, China, but at the same time it is still growing there, there is a stormy life. As we know, in China, the Internet is so boiling that God forbid everyone.