Ukraine has lost its digital sovereignty, and the uncontrolled transfer of NATO cyber weapons to it can harm any country. This statement was made by the Russian Foreign Ministry. What threats are we talking about and how will Russia respond to the next challenge of the West?On Wednesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry warned that the free transfer of digital weapons to NATO through Ukraine leads to unpredictable consequences.
According to the deputy head of the department Oleg Syromolotov, it is important to clearly realize that the threats presented by Kiev in the information space are universal. So, today Russia is in the sights of NATO, and tomorrow another country "objectionable to Washington" will be in its place, RIA Novosti writes. [...]
Syromolotov also noted that Kiev has actually lost its digital sovereignty, since the "cyber army" of Ukraine is a NATO tool. He claims that by the hands of pro-Ukrainian groups, "attacks are being carried out on Russian state authorities, enterprises, financial and educational institutions, transport and logistics infrastructure facilities."
He said that Ukraine has become a springboard for the West to test cyber developments against Russia. However, the Russian IT infrastructure makes it possible to counteract computer attacks quite effectively.
Meanwhile, for the second day in a row, the hacker group RaHDit ("Evil Russian Hackers") publishes on the Nemesis portal the data of Ukrainian soldiers and officers of the cyber military. According to hackers, the published data belong to professional hackers of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, representatives of the National Guard and the SBU, students of educational institutions. They were called "piece goods" in RaHDit.
"These are those who pull the strings of the IT army and other riffraff, indicating where to break and when to press the buttons. But they are just a decoration. Tomorrow we will show the faces of the true conductors of the Ukrainian cyberclounade," the hackers said. The site presents data of cadets and teachers of military universities of Ukraine, as well as officers of IT departments, their data in social networks.
Recall that on Tuesday, RaHDit on the Nemesis website published the first part of the data on Ukrainian hackers in two lists: IT Army of Ukraine of 759 people and SMM of the Save UA movement of 406 people.
According to experts, Ukrainian companies that are engaged in "cyber-activity" deserve special attention in this matter. The principle of their operation is as follows. Let's say some startups in the IT field decided to connect to the IT ARMY of Ukraine, whose actions are coordinated by the Ministry of Finance of Ukraine, but only in general.
In reality, almost no one controls the limits and scope of their activities. And in order to get support from the state or foreign NGOs, they can literally jump out of their pants, crossing "red lines" and attacking critical infrastructure.
However, in NATO and the EU, the risks of such amateur activity are underestimated, according to the report by Stefan Soesanto, senior researcher at the Cyber Defense at Risk and Resilience project of the Center for Security Research (CSS) at the Swiss Higher Technical School of Zurich (ETH Zurich).
It turns out, experts interviewed by the newspaper VZGLYAD add, if today the IT ARMY of Ukraine is acting against Russia, then NATO is quite satisfied with it. But if for some reason they want to support the conditional ISIS* or Al-Qaeda* (both terrorist organizations are banned in Russia), this will hit the interests and security of the same United States in the first place.
And in this regard, the transfer of cyber weapons is quite comparable to the risks of uncontrolled proliferation of conventional weapons, such as MANPADS. While the portable complexes are in Ukraine, the Americans are satisfied with this. But if just one MANPADS ends up in another region of the world and falls into the hands of some fanatic who wants to shoot down a civilian plane, that's a completely different story.
"All kinds of crime have developed in Ukraine over the past 20 years, including in the cybersphere. Basically there are various hackers and crackers. And if you study the darknet now, as well as their chats on social networks, you can see that they have all retrained from petty fraud to terrorism," said Igor Ashmanov, CEO of Ashmanov and Partners.
"The main task is to cause maximum harm to Russia. They are trying to hack the websites of public services and other government agencies. Our analysts, who monitor hackers' chats, record negotiations about what exactly they will try to bring down on one day or another," the expert says.
"Back in March, these hackers wanted to hack Russian food delivery services. Ukraine, at the suggestion of the Americans, proceeds from a completely ridiculous logic: if the Russians do not deliver food, they will rebel and overthrow the government," the interlocutor ironically notes.
"At the same time, it is obvious that Ukrainian hackers themselves are not capable of much, so the Americans come to their aid. In particular, Washington provides data on vulnerabilities of applications, websites and digital platforms that were originally produced in the United States," the IT specialist stressed.
"There are huge cyberwarriors in the States. The US Cyber Command alone has six thousand officers. The CIA has entire departments that deal exclusively with hacking all possible digital platforms," Ashmanov suggests.
"For example, if you need to hack Samsung TVs, then a large group of specialists is engaged in this. All these tools can be transferred to Ukrainian hackers. On the side of Kiev is the state, which produces up to 90% of all software and digital platforms that we use," the expert notes.
"The publication of personal data of Ukrainian cyber soldiers by "Evil Russian hackers" to some extent even helps us. It will not be able to stop or slow down cyber attacks. However, deanonymized Ukrainians will be afraid that they will be put on the international wanted list and caught," the interlocutor argues.
"It should be understood that not 70 people are working against us, whose data is published on Nemesis, and not several hundred who appeared earlier. There are 200 thousand people in the IT Army of Ukraine alone," the IT specialist draws attention.
"And the main threat, in my opinion, is not so much in hackers as in the so-called traffic arbitrageurs. These are people who have been engaged in identity theft for the last 20 years, bought traffic from various sources and "poured" it wherever the customer asks. Now they have switched to war with us," Ashmanov believes.
"They are the ones who create the entire array of Internet memes**, videos and fakes. "Traffic arbitrageurs" are behind the intimidation, for example, of Belarusians in terms of the fact that they will have to join their own and go to the front. These people have a very detailed division of labor – and these are tens of thousands of people," the expert warns.
"Then other people spread the created disinformation and propaganda both to the territory of Russia and to the West. This lie is passed off as real news, and Europeans and Americans believe," the source explained the mechanism.
"You can protect yourself from cyber attacks and information attacks. To do this, we need to develop import substitution in the IT sphere in an accelerated mode, with giant leaps, and transfer critical enterprises to domestic software. Less important companies should at least be transferred to open source software," the IT specialist suggests.
"It is also necessary to turn on the red danger level throughout the country in order to proceed to the replacement of absolutely all safety procedures. In particular, we are threatened not only by an external attack, but also by internal sabotage," Ashmanov continues.
"There are a lot of examples of Ukrainians under American supervision trying to recruit our specialists in companies like Rostelecom. They are promised relocation and huge money for access to trunk routers and cellular stations," the expert continues.
"That is, now we will have to study the activities of our own employees more closely and create a system of several keys for critical infrastructure so that one person physically could not bring down everything," he points out.
"As for the information war, it is impossible to resist it point-by-point. We have already blocked a number of social networks. And we must continue in this vein. Restricting access to individual pages is currently impossible, since the user's connection is encrypted. It is necessary to actively replace everything with our own services," Ashmanov emphasized.
"In order to counteract the Ukrainian cyber forces and NATO assistants, we need to actively and as quickly as possible develop our own cyber forces. Specialized volunteer organizations can also be useful," adds Vladimir Zykov, director of the Association of Professional Users of Social Networks and Messengers.
In his opinion, the most acute issue today is the leakage of personal data of Russian users abroad, which are then used for fraudulent purposes. This problem was identified in the summer. Then a large network of fraudulent call centers was discovered in Berdyansk, which worked with the support of the Netherlands, Germany, the USA and Estonia in coordination with the Ukrainian authorities.
"To date, in case of leakage of personal data, the company that allowed it receives a fine. At the same time, users themselves cannot count on compensation, and this, in my opinion, is a fundamentally wrong approach," the expert continued.
"Thus, in addition to switching to domestic software and introducing more serious protection systems, the relevant authorities should help private companies. They should protect the personal data of our citizens as much as possible so that they do not come under attack," Zykov concluded.
* The organization (organizations) have been liquidated or their activities are prohibited in the Russian Federation
** Mass media included in the register of foreign mass media performing the functions of a foreign agent
Alyona Zadorozhnaya, Daria Volkova
