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Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer

690 points by doener 1y ago

lnsru 1y ago
Working for a company in Germany which is planing production 3 months in advance using printed Excel sheets. The migration of ERP system gone wrong and nobody knows how to fix it. Production management tries to hide this fact and does not talk to the engineering department. This will go for years, consultants will gather their fees for non functional system. Obviously IT infrastructure is not needed for manufacturing. It is just nice to have.
- HPsquared 1y ago
  It depends how resilient they are. People often put all their eggs in one basket.
  - skrebbel 1y ago
    Russia has shown to be plenty resilient across the board. I find it hard to assume anything different here.
    - andy_ppp 1y ago
      Russia is also behind in modern technology by over a decade. I'm pretty sure if the CIA wanted they could destroy a lot of Russian software infrastructure, but it suits them to be in and out of Russian systems collecting information instead.
      - sjw987 1y ago
        This seems a bit of a stretch of a claim to make. In what ways would you say that Russia is a decade behind? I visited Russia a few years ago. Commercially, they have all the same technology we have (for me, in the UK). Like us, they outsource most of their manufacturing to China, but internally they produce software equivalent to (or to be honest greater than) what we produce. The difference seems to be that a lot of Russian software, websites and apps are more local, which gives the illusion that it's not as good. Google is multinational, whereas the equivalence Yandex sticks to Russian and Slavic language countries. I was actually quite surprised to see in some areas they are ahead in digitising things (government services, payments). I expected the opposite. Whatever software you can think of originating from the US, UK, or wherever, Russia has an equivalent. The major difference isn't the technical ability, but the commercial and cultural reach of that technology. Most of the world is happy to use Facebook, except Russia (and some others) who uses VK. We don't use VK, because it's Russian and we already use Facebook. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Uber (all artificially high value commercial products) have Russian equivalents. Sometimes they are even combined into one (Yandex has an Uber-like service within it). And when it comes to hardware, none of us are particularly strong with that. We all designate that to China, who sells it to all of us equally. Whenever we hear about cyberwarfare, cybercrime and exploits, we usually pin it on Russian/Chinese speaking hackers. Russia seems to have better primary, secondary and tertiary education in computing, and, like the rest of Eastern Europe, produces many of the better programmers (something you can see in open source communities). From discussions with Russians, the level of maths, science and computing education is higher at a younger age than it was for me in the UK. Quite a lot of what would be A-level (18) Maths in my country was taught at Russian secondary school level (16). In warfare, Russia has made fools of themselves in Ukraine, but on the other hand war is (sadly) the greatest contributor to military evolution. We see that with the introduction and evolution of drone warfare. Our UK Challenger tanks have been disabled and destroyed by far lower cost drones. All the technology associated with that (comms, jamming, avoiding jamming, self-targeting) is being rapidly developed by both Ukraine and Russia on the battlefield right now. Where exactly would a decade back put them, technologically speaking?
        ajuc 1y ago
        > This seems a bit of a stretch of a claim to make. In what ways would you say that Russia is a decade behind? Every country had it's own facebook. The difference was not features but scale. Russia scales to million of users. Facebook/Google etc. scale to billions of users. Everybody use Office, Chrome, commercial CADs, etc. Russia has no alternatives in most of these categories, and where it has alternatives - it's usually global (i.e. mostly made by programmers paid by western corporations) open source project they fork and add a russian skin over it. > And when it comes to hardware, none of us are particularly strong with that. USA and EU design the top-end chips and make crucial parts of the machines that produce chips (see ASML). Russia was left behind in 90s and tries to catch up using some open-source alternatives around RISC-V. But they have no capability of designing nor producing chips anywhere near modern desktop CPUs. Russian Lancet drones use smuggled Nvidia AI chips for example. We do not use smuggled Russian chips :)
        torginus 1y ago
        I have no love (or even reason) to support modern Russia, but this is just wrong. Russia has multiple home-grown office suites. Besides MS Office, the market leader still is full of bugs that harken back decades. They also have multiple commercial CAD programs (KOMPAS, T-FLEX) that scale up to everything including airliners. As for those 'western' top programmers, especially good ones, you'd be surprised how many of them are from post-USSR countries, including Russia (and Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan etc.). As for chips they are behind (for reasons beyond the scope of my post), but the post mainly extended to software, in which, many of the supposed crown jewels of the West (aka US) have been replicated quite successfully in other parts of the world including Russia.
        Ray20 1y ago
        > I was actually quite surprised to see in some areas they are ahead in digitising things (government services, payments). I expected the opposite. Why were you surprised by this? Russia is a totalitarian dictatorship, it is quite expected that systems of total control will be actively implemented there. And what is better for total control than digitalized things? > Russia seems to have better primary, secondary and tertiary education in computing, I've talked to many Russians and this is complete bs. The quality of education is quite low, but due to the competition created by remote work, programmers were easily paid 5x times more than people with comparable qualifications in other fields. So a lot of youth with a good work ethic put a lot of efforts into self-education in this fields even if they have no access to any systemic education in computing at all. In other words, in Russia, as in other Eastern European countries, you either do programming, or you are screwed. And the advantage of mathematics is that you don't need a teacher for it (for school level), everything is in the book, one thing after another. All you need is work ethic and motivation.
      - ivan_gammel 1y ago
        What do you mean by modern technology? Surely not the software. Russian engineering culture is strong and their IT strategy is far ahead of what you can find in Europe. I doubt it’s easy to hack into their systems - this breach illustrates it quite well, actually (it’s rare and required focused effort).
    - joules77 1y ago
      It's not called Resilience if you pick on someone weaker. Western support to Ukraine has been a real joke - https://carnegieendowment.org/europe/strategic-europe/2025/07/zelensky-is-the-worlds-loneliest-leader?lang=en https://carnegieendowment.org/europe/strategic-europe/2025/0...
      - vsepidory 1y ago
        [flagged]
      - praptak 1y ago
        You can help instead of waiting for politicians to "do something about it". It's not that hard to find a reputable organization that helps Ukraine and send it some money.
        ceejayoz 1y ago
        Unless that’s Musk or Bezos’s alt account, that’s like fighting a forest fire with a squirt gun.
        walterlw 1y ago
        you would be surprised how capable and resilient an army of squirt guns can be.
        ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
        I would be surprised if they could manage to keep refilling their squirt guns and deal with all the logistics required to keep an army available to use them
        kbelder 1y ago
        In 2024, charitable giving in the US was $592 billion. $392 billion of that was from individual donations. The US is a rich and (despite all you may hear) generous country. If 1% of our donations went to Ukraine, that's not a number to casually dismiss. Interestingly, $35 billion of that went to 'International affairs'. I would assume Ukraine was a significant part of that, but I don't know for sure. https://givingusa.org/giving-usa-2025-u-s-charitable-giving-grew-to-592-50-billion-in-2024-lifted-by-stock-market-gains https://givingusa.org/giving-usa-2025-u-s-charitable-giving-...
  - biblioteca 1y ago
    No, they’re right, manufacturing machines like these are independent. We’re so used to interconnected software systems for everything, but even though these things may run old versions of Windows in airgapped or isolated networks, that’s just to run the machines. You give it a thumbdrive, save a part file on it, and as long as it’s got power, materials, and whatever is necessary for basic safety like noble gas for sintering safety, you’re set. Even accounting systems are able to usually run fairly independently. It’s not that IT and business and manufacturing support software engineers don’t help, but they aren’t necessary, especially if they’re just making the same thing over and over.
- crinkly 1y ago
  In the late-90s I worked for a manufacturing company in a firmware dev capacity. They did everything on paper still. They migrated successfully to an in-house built ERP system sitting on top of Oracle. Big celebration, everyone happy. Six months later someone drove a forklift through the wall of the machine room into the UPS which caught fire and destroyed three racks of kit including the Oracle node. Turns out no one really trusted the system and was running paper on the side. When I left 6 years later they were still doing it on paper and reporting on Excel. It works and is considerably more forklift proof.
  - braggerxyz 1y ago
    Forklift-Proof ERP was not on my bingo card. Thanks for the laugh :D
- mrweasel 1y ago
  In the late 90s, early 2000, the Danish department of defence decided that they needed a new procurement system, DeMars, built on SAP. I know a sergent that worked in procurement at the time, he made insanely large purchases of everything he was responsible for in the months leading up to the launch. It came to the point where he was pulled in for questioning, on the suspicion of fraud. He explained that he had no faith in the launch of DeMars and wanted to ensure that stock would not run out. Everything was accounted for, if anyone believe that he as committing fraud, they where welcome to do a complete inventory. DeMars launched, and procurement basically stopped for a year. Only the items my friend was in charge of remained in stock, through out the launch/roll-out process.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
    When HP converted to SAP, I think their production basically stopped, for six months, and they lost $400 million. Switching to a new system; even when it is for the better, is a painful, expensive process. The company that I worked for, did a successful transition to SAP, but it took about two years, and a lot of butthurt.
    - cluckindan 1y ago
      Switching to SAP ERP was already an in-joke level of well-known catastrophe in IT consulting circles 20 years ago. I’m glad to see nothing has changed in that respect.
    - mensetmanusman 1y ago
      Sap adds so much syrup to the gears of business that it kills some.
    - mrweasel 1y ago
      I feel like a ton of SAP transitions only succeed because they have to.
    - pradn 1y ago
      They say its easier to change your company to fit SAP than to mold SAP to fit your company.
- perlgeek 1y ago
  On the other hand, once you have a well-established IT automation around your production, and people aren't trained in pre-automation production, it's actually quite hard to go back to manual. Probably also depends on the complexity of the orders and workflows.
- worldsayshi 1y ago
  Excel has the benefit of being understandable and fixable by a lot of regular office workers. It's a bit surprising that we don't have that feature as a requirement for most IT infrastructure. It would make it so much more usable.
  - rubyfan 1y ago
    Agree. IT has forgotten that computing should enable more people to be producers instead of mere consumers. IT management cares about control, audit, permissions and expense - no focus on achieving productivity in the workplace and in many cases are anti-user.
    - ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
      If you try running a business where several workers get involved with fixing and extending information systems (e.g. spreadsheets), you'll soon understand why successful IT management cares about controls, audits and permissions.
  - jjani 1y ago
    Most of those office workers were not capable of fixing anything on the first day they used Excel. Many didn't understand it at all. The main difference isn't that Excel is super accessible and easy to use for non-technical people; it's its ubiquity, and especially that of training on its usage.
    - worldsayshi 1y ago
      Ubiquity is important but it's not the only important factor. An excel sheet can typically be downloaded and experimented with. You can't download an ERP system and try stuff with it.
  - mark-r 1y ago
    I know a manufacturing plant that used an Excel spreadsheet to do all its production planning. There was only one person who understood the spreadsheet and could modify it, a consultant who made more than the plant manager. "Understandable and fixable" depends more on the complexity of the application rather than the fact it's in Excel.
- frteger 1y ago
  Working for a manufacturing company, you may be making drone parts, and you don’t really know which side of the war you’re making them for, because they can buy individual parts through different reputable-looking companies. You could also be making surgical parts that help save lives. Overall though, I think I’d rather be making nice practical furniture that hopefully people would never throw away. While I support people that want to protect, war is horrible.
- cluckindan 1y ago
  Without software, drones are useless. I suppose they can still assemble manually operated quadcopters if they know their inventory by heart, but they will be unable to produce more parts by 3D printing or drones capable of stable flight, autonomous operations, surveillance or any more advanced use cases. Even remote control is probably out of the picture.
  - greelin 1y ago
    They can continue to run the same thing they had before. As an old software engineer, I can say with certainty that software engineering is a very, VERY wasteful practice. We could all be running Windows 3 right now, DOS, or some old Unix. The overhead involved in making actual advancements shows our slow progress as a species, and that we’re in a thread discussing a drone manufacturing facility being blown up in a war and how much that matters. I think the natives had it right to live off of the land peacefully, and if anything to devote full time on science to determining what we do to help life survive in the universe.
    - ordu 1y ago
      Ahh... Philosophy... I can't agree with you. People have got their human mind as a result of ever increasing and self-inflicted costs driven by a competition among males. They developed minds to play politics and they came to a point when 20% of metabolism of human body was devoted to its brain. The result of such a wasteful way to spend their energy resources? Humans colonized all the Earth, drove to the extinction almost all big animals, and now there are as much humans on the Earth as mosquitos. Looks like a win, doesn't it? These things go off the rails sometimes. Just today I've found a new example to it: highlanders who had practiced brutal initiation ceremonies “in which they were forced to drink only partly slaked lime that blistered their mouths and throats, were beaten with stinging nettles, were denied water, had barbed grass pushed up their urethras to cause bleeding, were compelled to swallow bent lengths of cane until vomiting was induced, and were required to fellate older men, who also had anal intercourse with them” gave them up after only minimal contact with outside disapproval. Some later told anthropologists they felt “deeply shamed” by their treatment of their own sons and were relieved to stop.[1] The waste of resources into useless things doesn't lead to good outcomes each time, but I believe that software engineering will lead to something. I'm not Jesus, I can't predict exactly what the beneficial results will be, but at least I can point to a growing ability of engineers of handling complexity. It lags behind their ability to create complexity, but still it grows. [1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-arguments-about-aborigines https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-arguments-about...
- tantalor 1y ago
  > Obviously IT infrastructure is not needed for manufacturing Is this sarcasm?
- dmix 1y ago
  > The migration of ERP system gone wrong and nobody knows how to fix it. I swear this is SAPs main business model Just endless consulting bills to set it up then fix it when it's delivered in a broken state.
  - torginus 1y ago
    That and 'if you don't use SAP you're not compliant with EU regulation XYZ and we won't do business with you'
- littlestymaar 1y ago
  Reminds me of the Louvois[1] disaster in the French armed forces, they fucked the payment system so bad they had to roll back to manual accounting for a moment. Yes, for the whole French Army, which was at the time involved in multiple foreign operations… [1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logiciel_unique_%C3%A0_vocation_interarm%C3%A9es_de_la_solde https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logiciel_unique_%C3%A0_vocatio...
- bearjaws 1y ago
  I worked for a company that was working on rolling out D365 for 2 years :) I was acquired by a company that was working on Sales Force integration for 3 years, I left before it was fully functional. They had 4 full time devs working on Sales Force, meanwhile we had built the entire company in a year with 4 devs.
v5v3 1y ago
>Ukrainian cyber activists, in cooperation with military intelligence... So the foreign intelligence services gave them a button push so it's not a direct cyber war on Russia.
- gghffguhvc 1y ago
  Likely. But also could have been some thugs with a wrench in a basement and the sys admin giving up the ssh keys and 2fa etc.
  - HenryBemis 1y ago
    It's Ukraine. Are you aware of the "banks' debt collectors"? They had thugs knocking on your door (and your face) for an overdue loan payment; they would _of course_ use violence/torture to extract information.
    - HenryBemis 1y ago
      Whoah.. -4.. Fun fact, I was internal auditor in a bank (I will not specify the year(s) for safety/privacy). We did the due diligence and ended up buying a Ukrainian bank. Part of the 'collections' was really to smash people's faces. Believe it or not. But sure.. you know best.
      - wiseowise 1y ago
        Guess whose influence and where it comes from?
        fennecbutt 1y ago
        Yup, I feel like Ukraine has been trying to break away from the society is a meat grinder culture of Russia for a while and the war has made if clear who's on what side locally. My only qualm with them is their not so great support for gay people, but then during the war ofc the party line is now they love their gay soldiers. Would have been nice to see more action around that beforehand but I get it. Even other first world countries still have plenty of problems as a gay person, especially gay men.
HenryBemis 1y ago
I remember Steve Gibson saying some years back that the only reason USA doesn't (cyber-)'attack' Russia's train infra is the inability to 'hide the traces' of the attack, and it would be 'easily' attributed/mapped back to the USA causing (political) issues. Well, Ukraine doesn't have 'that' challenge. On the other hand (and I'm not defending a drone company), anyone that has a business should know by now that ransomware (with our without deletion) is a real thing, and it's not an 'if' question, it's a 'when' question. I have never worked with/for a Russian company, so it would be interesting to hear/read from someone who has, how 'well organized' are they? GRC-wise. Assuming that someone would run the COBIT framework on them (Russian companies), would the 'average' be 'ok' or it's a big mess (kinda like working for an EU company in early 00's)?
- podgorniy 1y ago
  > I remember Steve Gibson saying some years back that the only reason USA doesn't (cyber-)'attack' Russia's train infra is the inability to 'hide the traces' of the attack This is not a real reason. This explanation hides the real reason: Russia is a valuable geopolitical partner for USA. Regarless who are in power in USA - all presidents tried to make deals/contacts with Russia. There is no value for USA in getting Russia loose this war, have internal instability or split in 20-ish national states. USA wins more from russia being as it is today with all it blood, suffering and hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by the regime thrive for survival. Actually USA are afraid to push too much to cause internal issues in Russia. And russian ruling class knows that.
- perlgeek 1y ago
  I guess another reason is that there isn't too much IT infrastructure that Russian trains depend on. There are ticket sales systems for people being transported, but much is freight trains, and if there was an easy way to disrupt that, you can be sure that Ukraine would've done it by now, because the Russian military heavily depends on rail-based supplies.
- arthur-st 1y ago
  I did work for a Russian financial multinational just before COVID-19, as a native Russian speaker, and it was a free-for-all mess interally. The IT side had a load-bearing, old-school sysadmin type with a personality for heroics.
raverbashing 1y ago
While this is a move that will hinder production for a while I'd say maybe they should have been more creative They should have checked the source codes and added some changes to make drones unpredictably unreliable "Oh this totally innocent code change? Oh look it makes the gps act weird if longitude is between a certain range how weird"
- WJW 1y ago
  When there's hundreds of drones raining down on your civilians every day, just disabling the production has a a higher priority than being cutesy with things that might work further away into the future.
  - _1tem 1y ago
    In several cases during World War II, the Allies intentionally allowed German attacks to happen (or did not act to prevent them) to avoid revealing that they had cracked German codes, particularly the Enigma cipher.
    - mcintyre1994 1y ago
      I don't think that's comparable because the Allies hoped cracking Enigma would reveal other secrets in the future. Ukraine probably aren't worried that Russia are going to do something else more worth interrupting with their drones in the future.
    - jcranmer 1y ago
      Actually, I don't think that's known to have ever happened. The Allies protected Ultra intelligence by parallel construction--coming up with other means to 'discover' the same information (principally, sending a reconnaissance flight to the known location of wolf packs). The main claim for this myth is the sacrifice of Coventry during the Battle of Britain, but as far as I'm aware, historians are in general agreement that Ultra was unable to ascertain that Coventry was the target before the raid took place.
bettercallsalad 1y ago
[flagged]
praptak 1y ago
Not many companies explicitly prepare for the scenario where every single data storage unit in the company is effectively wiped and you have to redeploy from zero. If you never bootstrap from zero (nor simulate this) then your systems probably have cycles in their deployment dependencies. Your config pusher is deployed from Jenkins/Puppet/Ansible but 2 years ago someone made Jenkins dependent on the config pusher for its own config. Now you cannot just deploy these systems in order, you have to replay the history before that change.
- thyristan 1y ago
  Almost everything will have cycles in IT. People want and security requires some kind of SSO. Now SSO is a dependency for almost everything, including the administration of underlying systems that run SSO. Same for the network. Same for a lot of things. Bootstrapping from zero will never be easy and will always take some time. I don't think you can prepare your way out of this, short of preparing a fully redundant, fully separate secondary infrastructure.
  - pferde 1y ago
    This is called "break-glass procedure" in enterprise IT (as in "break glass in case of emergency"), and often consists of independent, normally unused, admin accounts on key systems, access info for which is locked in some safe location, e.g. physical safe in a secure location. Testing this reliably is difficult, though, and often these procedures and their documentation is outdated.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - praptak 1y ago
    I agree that fully redundant & separate infrastructure is unrealistic. I'm also not saying you can be 100% prepared. My point is that you can improve your posture. What you can do is to have a sandbox environment where you periodically do a full setup exercise from a prepper disk. Conceptually it's not that different from testing backup recovery (ok, most companies neglect this too, so maybe you have a point :) ).
nrvn 1y ago
cybersecurity 101: - know your threats - assess your risks based on identified threats - backup 3-2-1 strategy (3 copies of your data on 2 independent storage places with 1 copy offline and offsite) - "build the world from scratch" plan with the assumption that all infra is completely and irreversibly destroyed. - assume you have already been hacked but you don't yet know about it. Build your indicators of compromise based on that simple assumption. Observing how some "groups of people" act in a totally ignorant fashion is amusing.
grishka 1y ago
That's a very odd website. Blocked by the Russian government so you get a TLS error, once you get past that, you get the Cloudflare "you are blocked" page, and then you use a VPN and... get the option to read this article in Russian.
- sofixa 1y ago
  Doesn't sound like it's the fault of the website, but of your government and maybe CloudFlare (although they could be blocking you because of the TLS error's underlying reason, not because you're in Russia).
  - grishka 1y ago
    No, that page is always a sign that the person who configured Cloudflare for their website has chosen to deliberately block Russian IPs.
- ivan_gammel 1y ago
  The linked page is in English, but speaking of the option - residents of Russian Federation probably were not a target audience of Russian version of this website anyway. Contrary to some popular beliefs in Russia about language wars, many people still do speak Russian in Ukraine and media do publish articles in Russian.
  - orbital-decay 1y ago
    >residents of Russian Federation probably were not a target audience of Russian version of this website anyway Deliberately blocking the supposed enemy from hearing you does strike me as irrational, though. The mere fact they're doing Russian censors' job should probably make them recheck if they got anything wrong in their decision process, just in case.
    - falcor84 1y ago
      What makes you think that it's the Ukranians that are blocking Russian users from accessing it?
BrandoElFollito 1y ago
I run a small home lab, about 30 services One day I decided to change my main disk and used the opportunity to rebuild everything from scratch and from backups. I was up in about an hour. And then I spent a week fixing this and that, ah yes I changed that too and, crap, I cannot remember why this thingie is set up this way. And some more. This is a one-man lab, with simple services, all on docker. I also work in IT. Recovering from scratch a whole infrastructure managed by many people over the years is a titanic task. I helped to recover my nearby hospital as a volunteer when it was ransomwared. The poor two IT guys over there has no idea how to recover and the official help was pityful. I also helped with a ransomware attack on a large company. The effort people had to do to remember why something was that way, or just remember whatever was colossal. Sure a lot of things were "documented" and "tested" but reality hit hard.
- WhyNotHugo 1y ago
  Modern IT practices don’t really contemplate disaster recovery. Even organisations with strict backup procedures seldom test recovery (most never at all). Everything is quickly strapped together due to teams being understaffed. Preparing infrastructure in a way such that it can easily be recreated is easily twice the effort as “just” setting it up the usual way.
  - andrelaszlo 1y ago
    Just the other day one of my clients had a production critical server failing and we started restoring it from backups. Turns out some of the software running on it had some weird licensing checks tied to the hardware so it refused to start on the new server. It turns out that the company that made this important piece of software doesn't even exist anymore.
    - tialaramex 1y ago
      Virtualization really helps. We have a lot of weird software which requires hardware dongles, but they're all USB dongles and they're all virtualized, one of the DC racks has a few U worth of just USB socket -> dongle wired up so that if we spin up a VM it can say "Hey, give me a USB socket with a FooCorp OmniBloat dongle on it" and get one unless they're all used.
frou_dh 1y ago
I wonder to what extent either side is worried about the firmware on the drones. Somehow getting tampered-with firmware onto the drones that your enemy is using seems like it would be valuable.
- benterix 1y ago
  Very interesting but risky (easy to discover and renders the whole operation ineffective). So I believe what they did was heavy-handed but the most reasonable.
- trebligdivad 1y ago
  Yeh, it would seem in some ways more useful than shutting down the factory; if you gently made all the drones do something, like let them be remote controlled, or bomb the place they were launched from.
  - fennecbutt 1y ago
    But once that happened a handful of times it would be corrected. I suppose it could be used sparingly but Ukraine would have no way of knowing when to use it. Perhaps a Bluetooth or whatever else the drone has on board "keep away" beacon for vips.
    - jncfhnb 1y ago
      You say that, but Israel booby trapped the Hezbollah comm devices _twice_ with physical explosives.
    - Faark 1y ago
      There are tones of non-obvious options. Eg make it appear like being shoot-downs. With a bunch of RNG / logic to make it non-obvious... random percentage, only when getting close to target, so many ways... The real enemy is QA. Don't want it misbehaving during a virtual test flight.
- morkalork 1y ago
  One funny tick that's supposedly appeared is installing viruses on the SD cards used in drones so if/when a drone is downed intact and picked up by a curious enemy, their computer is infected.
helge9210 1y ago
AI translation (to English) is off in places. "Ukrainian cybercriminals" is not in the original and was picked as the translation of the closest sounding full word.
littlestymaar 1y ago
> The attack destroyed over 47 TB of critical data, I'm very dubious that there would be such an amount of “critical” data pretty much anywhere, besides the banking and insurance sector. And particularly not at a drone manufacturer.
- zulban 1y ago
  Training data like audio, pictures, and video perhaps.
- Mashimo 1y ago
  Probably added all raw disk sizes together. Or all the data, including duplicates.
  - littlestymaar 1y ago
    Exactly.
- dogleash 1y ago
  Depends on how you slice it. If you focus only on data with high-uptime requirements, no probably not 50 TB. If you include low-uptime requirement but low-replaceability stuff like all the products' mechanical, electrical and software designs, documentation and artifacts? Easily 50 TB.
Garvi 1y ago
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submeta 1y ago
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- wiseowise 1y ago
  > It’s a proxy war fought by the US and it‘s vassals (aka allies) and Russia. That’s the spirit, comrade. Remember! When it’s decadent West/NATO, they’re vassals. When it is glorious BRICS, they’re allies. Don’t mix them up! Good luck!
  - submeta 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - AnimalMuppet 1y ago
      > Look at how Trump talks about annexing Greenland. He speaks out what other US politicians have been hiding behind diplomatic wording. Hardly. He is very much not a normal US politician, and not just because he says what others were thinking. No, he's abnormal because he thinks what nobody else was thinking.
    - cosmicgadget 1y ago
      Here's the wonderful thing: he'll be gone in 3.5 years or less. You're stuck with your guy until he dies because like the people that voted for Trump, you don't mind abject corruption if you get the appearance of strength. The difference is, annexing Greenland is just bluster to distract from the corruption. You guys actually invaded Ukraine and are paying dearly for it.
      - submeta 1y ago
        [flagged]
        cosmicgadget 1y ago
        No I am very familiar with the Russian "I'm not political" crowd. The personal attack is fun though, do you have wounded nationalist pride?
LongjumpingCat 1y ago
[flagged]
- kattagarian 1y ago
  thank you for your AI-generated answer!
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- doublerabbit 1y ago
  > demonstrates how cyber operations are now deeply integrated into military strategy. This isn't new. Cyber attacks have always been used in military strategy since their existence.
mattxxx 1y ago
Weird thing: the timestamp on the upper right part of the camera is "01-02-1970" :thinking_face:
- mycall 1y ago
  One day or one month past UNIX Epoch
- jug 1y ago
  Day 1 after the start of the Unix epoch. Looks like a clock with unset/reset date that has had one day pass.
aaron695 1y ago
[dead]
cyber1 1y ago
Glory to Ukraine! Slava Ukraini!
drweevil 1y ago
And we believe this why? A Ukrainian web site, no independent corroboration. All righty then.
- giingyui 1y ago
  [dead]
red-iron-pine 1y ago
are the raw files available online?
- alexandrutocar 1y ago
  i would not think so as it involves technology with a military application.
roody15 1y ago
Ukrainian hackers ….? Hmm
93po 1y ago
The source of this news is the Ukrainian military which seems to exaggerate and spread propaganda (as does every other country of course). I don't know why we accept this information as reliable.
- consumer451 1y ago
  I am genuinely curious, what are the known examples of them exaggerating and spreading propaganda, regarding operations like this?
  - 93po 1y ago
    Ghost of Kyiv was recognized by Ukraine itself as a myth. Snake Island "go fuck yourself" was misrepresented (they were killed vs captured), plenty of others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_in_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine#Ukrainian_themes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_in_the_Russian_... There's also just endless small stuff (shorts/tiktoks/cam footage) on social media (reddit) that really does not pass the sniff test. I think what Russia is doing is terrible, I am not defending them at all. I am just allergic to bullshit, and there is plenty of smelly things happening on the Ukrainian side, though of course I recognize the Russians are especially bad in this regard.
    - consumer451 1y ago
      The ghost of Kyiv was recognized as a myth at the time of it's spread. The Snake Island story is understandable. Every country makes mistakes about KIA vs. MIA. I was not very clear, but I meant Ukrainian intelligence services claiming operational success where there was none. It's also interesting that this Wikipedia entry appears devoid of UA false propaganda after 2022. I wonder if they realized that this was not a good Wiki entry on which to appear.
      - 93po 1y ago
        it is worth something if it's recognized as a myth by official sources at the time, but it doesn't change that social media (reddit) was absolutely jammed full of stuff about it, presenting it as factual, and has led probably millions of people to believe it was real. and even beyond the posts that were explicitly about it, comment sections continued to refer to it in serious ways. my whole point is there is a concerted effort to spread it as an "us vs them" narrative, with ukraine being the "us" part (as an american). what i ultimately care about is manipulation, because manipulation and disinformation erode democracy, and it's overwhelmingly done by the rich and powerful and at the expense of the working class. there are endless billions of dollars getting funneled into the military industrial complex around ukraine, and the more americans align with ukraine, and the more americans can feel invested and interested in the war in happy-feel-good-ways (like having heroes and "fuck russia" moments) the more americans are okay with their tax dollars getting spent this way. whatever machinery is at play here has very successfully captured the support of a massive part of the American left, and the same people you see protesting about the environment are the same people you see waiving ukraine flags and being manipulated into suddenly being pro-war despite being against things like the war in iraq. billionaires continue to make their billions, people continue to believe what they read on reddit and watch on corporate news, and the narrative is always things that aren't class consciousness.
dmix 1y ago
Here is a translated version of the telegram message posted by the hacking team: > LLC “Gaskar Integration” (Gaskar Group)—one of the largest UAV manufacturers in Russia—has just been penetrated right down to the tonsils in the course of demilitarization and denazification. > VO Team, together with the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance (https://t.me/UCAgroup https://t.me/UCAgroup) and another very well‑known organization whose mere mention makes the vatniks’ bottle‑openings burst (https://gur.gov.ua/ https://gur.gov.ua/), carried out large‑scale operations: we seized all of Gaskar Group’s network and server infrastructure, gathered valuable data on their current and prospective UAVs, destroyed that data, and knocked the entire infrastructure offline. > By the way, from the information we obtained, the PRC is helping Gaskar Group with production and staff training. China transferred technology for the newest UAVs—technology that is now in our hands . > VO Team focused on wiping out the production complex’s infrastructure. On‑site we erased more than 250 hosts (4 ESXi servers, 46 virtual servers, 200+ workstations) and bricked about 20 MikroTik devices. In total we destroyed 47 TB of valuable data at Gaskar Group—including 10 TB of backups—and disabled all production and auxiliary systems. > The scum at Gaskar Group have the blood of hundreds of Ukrainian children, women, and elderly on their hands. That’s why we went after this target with special zeal. We now possess the lists of ALL employees, their home addresses, information about their family members, and much more… We’re in your home computers and phones—we’re everywhere . Not a single bastard from Gaskar Group will escape responsibility! > The sword of Damocles already hangs by a thin thread over your heads. It’s too late to spew excuses like “we’re apolitical” or “we were just making money”…. > The whole world can see that the so‑called Russian Federation has strategically lost everything. Defeat and collapse of that unwashed entity are only a matter of time. VO Team is collecting data on everyone involved in Putin’s criminal war—the deaths of our children, mothers, and all Ukrainians. Retribution is inevitable and is drawing near!
- consumer451 1y ago
  > China transferred technology for the newest UAVs—technology that is now in our hands Well, this is quite the interesting tidbit. Thanks for posting the translation.
Kapura 1y ago
Cyber warfare is really reaching a new peak in Ukraine, and not just the more-traditional cyberattacks like this. The target is of note; the drones themselves are the thing that's setting this war apart from all of the primarily human powered wars of the past centuries. Drones have revolutionized reconnaissance, sabotage, and munitions interception. Relative to their material cost, they can be terrifically destructive, and with the advances in image recognition in the past decade some are able to operate even when affected by electronic signal jamming. This is some very cyberpunk shit going on right now. This was obviously a very high-value target, and Ukraine has shown themselves again to be masters of asymmetric warfare: taking out a sizable chunk of Russia's long range bombers using drones smuggled across Russia, and now impacting one of the centers of Russia's drone manufacturing. It is difficult to see how the war will end, but it is clear that Ukraine is not about to stop fighting.
- jncfhnb 1y ago
  Remains to be seen if the lessons of this war extend to other possible wars though. It is possible that FPV drones are showing up as so important because Russia is committed to a disgusting meat sluice of fodder to achieve its marginal territory gains. Most countries don’t have the appetite for those kind of losses. Most countries, frankly, don’t have the audacity to set these kinds of war aims. I predict they won’t matter too much to the war meta. At least not so much as cheap long range jet drones which are also becoming significant here.
  - kjkjadksj 1y ago
    Seems like drone warfare is just democratizing what e.g the US has in capabilities with their precision munitions already, in a perhaps less capable but far cheaper manner. Put it in other words if this was the US directy engaging russia, it would probably be tomahawk missiles or something along those lines just like we’ve seen last few decades, vs a sort of Air Hogs with a bomb.
    - jncfhnb 1y ago
      Nah it would still be FPV drones The question is how useful would these things be if your opponent wasn’t blindly rushing forward? The role of this tech is effectively a dynamic minefield more or less
rclkrtrzckr 1y ago
I am working for a medium sized Swiss company. We're coding our own ERP, based on a nightmare of a stack. We call it "security by confusion". An attacker would maybe find its way in, but he'll never find the way out. If he destroys 90% of our code, we'll still be up and running, because 95% of the codebase is obsolete.
- akudha 1y ago
  lol, I don’t know if this is scary or impressive :)
- barbazoo 1y ago
  This sounds like the kind of resiliency that a process like evolution would create :)
- m4rtink 1y ago
  Real world ICE barier! :D
- boznz 1y ago
  Have coded a couple of full MRP systems for various large companies based on my own model and I would be intrigued to see how this will work. I usually include the default recommended security and DR practices and then add my own OTP-hash based layer for key authorisations. I thought I was paranoid, but your system sounds more like an end-of-the-world scenario rather than just keep the production-line going in the factory.
- sam_goody 1y ago
  There was an interview with some U.S. army rep. that was pretty famous a few years back. He said that even if hackers broke in to the U.S. systems they wouldn't achieve anything due to how old, convoluted and buggy the systems were - even we who have full access can barely get anything to work!! Of course, that was said purposefully, and may not reflect the truth at all. But still, the thought that that is security for some (and I am sure it is for someone, somewhere) is kind of an extension of security by obscurity that is scary.
geoffbp 1y ago
How many drones would they have destroyed? Couldn’t find that on the article
hosh 1y ago
The headline of the article called these people cyber activists, and in the text of the article, they were called cybercriminals. Which is it? It reminds me a bit with the situation with privateers during the age of sail. These were often people operating at the edge of the law, or even outright outlaws, given a letter of marque, a license to raid warships and commerce against a specific adversary. I'm sure out on the high seas, abuses happen. The people who put together the doctrine on 4th Generation Warfare talked about the blurring of civilian and military. Rules of engagement gets fuzzier.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- torlok 1y ago
  Russians are kiling civilians with drones each day. I don't think this is some gray area hybrid warfare, it's just regular people not wanting drones to kill their neighbours.
  - Mars008 1y ago
    > Russians are kiling civilians with drones each day. Same do Ukrainians, don't they? More over, long before they killed civilians and defenders in Iraq and Afghanistan on Americans invitation. Then left without even saying 'sorry'. Since 2014 they were shelling Donetsk just for fun, killing people at random. So, it's more complicated than you'll find in western mass media. Especially in EU where full picture is illegal.
    - SetTheorist 1y ago
      No, they do not. Ukrainians have not and do not deliberately target civilians in their war of self-defense against the invading russian army. Russia consistently and deliberately targets civilians. There is no "both sides" here.
      - Mars008 1y ago
        > Ukrainians have not and do not deliberately target civilians There news on Russian side daily of Ukrainians doing exactly this, deliberately targeting civilians. Also usually their own non-combatants who are trying to surrender. This is war crime. There are dirty tactics in this war which western public will learn about later. For now it's given a rosy optimistic picture approved by Zelinsky office. That's how 'Support Ukraine' is pushed on them. In fact it's 'support the war', as Ukrainians are dying in big numbers. By the way, official number of civilians killed 3 years is lower that in Gaza in 3 months.
baby 1y ago
What's interesting is that this whole challenge is making Russia stronger. Russia has increased its military industry and its now running full steam. Every attack is giving them an opportunity to harden. All of that is meaningless if it makes Russia stronger and more resilient to embargos and cyber/physical attacks in the long run. For all of this to have meaning it has to have a fall of USSR kind of impact at some point, otherwise we just strengthened one of the world's most dangerous state.
- immibis 1y ago
  Are they? They're running at full stream and yet they're still in a years-long stalemate in Ukraine? Authoritarian governments always fail, because they get used to achieving everything by simply ordering it to be achieved, while the laws of physics don't obey orders. Meanwhile they're murdering how many of their own soldiers per day?
- brentm 1y ago
  Of course but also Ukraine doesn't have the privilege to care about the long term right now. You can't lose the battle today to win the war that you may never live to fight.
  - baby 1y ago
    I agree, I just think we should do more than just helping Ukraine
- zaptheimpaler 1y ago
  Russia recently announced that they want to import millions of immigrants now, likely because they massacred a big chunk of their young workforce. Their economy and production capacity is slowly crumbling, political dissent is rising. I don't think they're getting stronger.
- tim333 1y ago
  It's just a feature of long running wars that both sides boost their military. Russia is stronger in some ways but weaker in others.
nicholast 1y ago
The only tech that scales cheaper than drones are digital interventions. This is a better way to intercept.
madebywelch 1y ago
I'm curious if they ever practiced any sort of disaster recovery scenarios.
dopa42365 1y ago
>GASKAR INTEGRATION Definitely one of the companies that everyone has heard of before. No need to mention any of their brand or product names, they're that famous. $3 million revenue in 2024. I'm sure we'll hear more about the epic defeat of this major military supplier in the future.
- datameta 1y ago
  Cynical sarcasm so thick, one could spread it with a spoon. What do you get from trying to devalue the successful outcome?
hdb385 1y ago
Ukraine winning again! lol
garfieldnate 1y ago
Anyone else amused by the date on the picture being 1 day from the beginning of the Unix epoch?
ropable 1y ago
I'd bet that their stickiest problem will be restoring and replacing all the weird IT-OT interface parts (e.g. some random Windows 98 box which is the only thing can run the CNC). No one ever thinks to document or back up those things.
ShadowBanThis03 1y ago
The world's civilized countries should unite to wipe out Russia's IT infrastructure.
gianpaj 1y ago
"Additionally, all doors at the drone production plant have been locked, forcing employees to use fire exits."
Techrecovery 1y ago
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SandyBauman 1y ago
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690 points by doener 1y ago

Working for a company in Germany which is planing production 3 months in advance using printed Excel sheets. The migration of ERP system gone wrong and nobody knows how to fix it. Production management tries to hide this fact and does not talk to the engineering department. This will go for years, consultants will gather their fees for non functional system. Obviously IT infrastructure is not needed for manufacturing. It is just nice to have.

HPsquared 1y ago
It depends how resilient they are. People often put all their eggs in one basket.
- skrebbel 1y ago
  Russia has shown to be plenty resilient across the board. I find it hard to assume anything different here.
  - andy_ppp 1y ago
    Russia is also behind in modern technology by over a decade. I'm pretty sure if the CIA wanted they could destroy a lot of Russian software infrastructure, but it suits them to be in and out of Russian systems collecting information instead.
    - sjw987 1y ago
      This seems a bit of a stretch of a claim to make. In what ways would you say that Russia is a decade behind? I visited Russia a few years ago. Commercially, they have all the same technology we have (for me, in the UK). Like us, they outsource most of their manufacturing to China, but internally they produce software equivalent to (or to be honest greater than) what we produce. The difference seems to be that a lot of Russian software, websites and apps are more local, which gives the illusion that it's not as good. Google is multinational, whereas the equivalence Yandex sticks to Russian and Slavic language countries. I was actually quite surprised to see in some areas they are ahead in digitising things (government services, payments). I expected the opposite. Whatever software you can think of originating from the US, UK, or wherever, Russia has an equivalent. The major difference isn't the technical ability, but the commercial and cultural reach of that technology. Most of the world is happy to use Facebook, except Russia (and some others) who uses VK. We don't use VK, because it's Russian and we already use Facebook. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Uber (all artificially high value commercial products) have Russian equivalents. Sometimes they are even combined into one (Yandex has an Uber-like service within it). And when it comes to hardware, none of us are particularly strong with that. We all designate that to China, who sells it to all of us equally. Whenever we hear about cyberwarfare, cybercrime and exploits, we usually pin it on Russian/Chinese speaking hackers. Russia seems to have better primary, secondary and tertiary education in computing, and, like the rest of Eastern Europe, produces many of the better programmers (something you can see in open source communities). From discussions with Russians, the level of maths, science and computing education is higher at a younger age than it was for me in the UK. Quite a lot of what would be A-level (18) Maths in my country was taught at Russian secondary school level (16). In warfare, Russia has made fools of themselves in Ukraine, but on the other hand war is (sadly) the greatest contributor to military evolution. We see that with the introduction and evolution of drone warfare. Our UK Challenger tanks have been disabled and destroyed by far lower cost drones. All the technology associated with that (comms, jamming, avoiding jamming, self-targeting) is being rapidly developed by both Ukraine and Russia on the battlefield right now. Where exactly would a decade back put them, technologically speaking?
      - ajuc 1y ago
        > This seems a bit of a stretch of a claim to make. In what ways would you say that Russia is a decade behind? Every country had it's own facebook. The difference was not features but scale. Russia scales to million of users. Facebook/Google etc. scale to billions of users. Everybody use Office, Chrome, commercial CADs, etc. Russia has no alternatives in most of these categories, and where it has alternatives - it's usually global (i.e. mostly made by programmers paid by western corporations) open source project they fork and add a russian skin over it. > And when it comes to hardware, none of us are particularly strong with that. USA and EU design the top-end chips and make crucial parts of the machines that produce chips (see ASML). Russia was left behind in 90s and tries to catch up using some open-source alternatives around RISC-V. But they have no capability of designing nor producing chips anywhere near modern desktop CPUs. Russian Lancet drones use smuggled Nvidia AI chips for example. We do not use smuggled Russian chips :)
        torginus 1y ago
        I have no love (or even reason) to support modern Russia, but this is just wrong. Russia has multiple home-grown office suites. Besides MS Office, the market leader still is full of bugs that harken back decades. They also have multiple commercial CAD programs (KOMPAS, T-FLEX) that scale up to everything including airliners. As for those 'western' top programmers, especially good ones, you'd be surprised how many of them are from post-USSR countries, including Russia (and Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan etc.). As for chips they are behind (for reasons beyond the scope of my post), but the post mainly extended to software, in which, many of the supposed crown jewels of the West (aka US) have been replicated quite successfully in other parts of the world including Russia.
      - Ray20 1y ago
        > I was actually quite surprised to see in some areas they are ahead in digitising things (government services, payments). I expected the opposite. Why were you surprised by this? Russia is a totalitarian dictatorship, it is quite expected that systems of total control will be actively implemented there. And what is better for total control than digitalized things? > Russia seems to have better primary, secondary and tertiary education in computing, I've talked to many Russians and this is complete bs. The quality of education is quite low, but due to the competition created by remote work, programmers were easily paid 5x times more than people with comparable qualifications in other fields. So a lot of youth with a good work ethic put a lot of efforts into self-education in this fields even if they have no access to any systemic education in computing at all. In other words, in Russia, as in other Eastern European countries, you either do programming, or you are screwed. And the advantage of mathematics is that you don't need a teacher for it (for school level), everything is in the book, one thing after another. All you need is work ethic and motivation.
    - ivan_gammel 1y ago
      What do you mean by modern technology? Surely not the software. Russian engineering culture is strong and their IT strategy is far ahead of what you can find in Europe. I doubt it’s easy to hack into their systems - this breach illustrates it quite well, actually (it’s rare and required focused effort).
  - joules77 1y ago
    It's not called Resilience if you pick on someone weaker. Western support to Ukraine has been a real joke - https://carnegieendowment.org/europe/strategic-europe/2025/07/zelensky-is-the-worlds-loneliest-leader?lang=en https://carnegieendowment.org/europe/strategic-europe/2025/0...
    - vsepidory 1y ago
      [flagged]
    - praptak 1y ago
      You can help instead of waiting for politicians to "do something about it". It's not that hard to find a reputable organization that helps Ukraine and send it some money.
      - ceejayoz 1y ago
        Unless that’s Musk or Bezos’s alt account, that’s like fighting a forest fire with a squirt gun.
        walterlw 1y ago
        you would be surprised how capable and resilient an army of squirt guns can be.
        ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
        I would be surprised if they could manage to keep refilling their squirt guns and deal with all the logistics required to keep an army available to use them
        kbelder 1y ago
        In 2024, charitable giving in the US was $592 billion. $392 billion of that was from individual donations. The US is a rich and (despite all you may hear) generous country. If 1% of our donations went to Ukraine, that's not a number to casually dismiss. Interestingly, $35 billion of that went to 'International affairs'. I would assume Ukraine was a significant part of that, but I don't know for sure. https://givingusa.org/giving-usa-2025-u-s-charitable-giving-grew-to-592-50-billion-in-2024-lifted-by-stock-market-gains https://givingusa.org/giving-usa-2025-u-s-charitable-giving-...
- biblioteca 1y ago
  No, they’re right, manufacturing machines like these are independent. We’re so used to interconnected software systems for everything, but even though these things may run old versions of Windows in airgapped or isolated networks, that’s just to run the machines. You give it a thumbdrive, save a part file on it, and as long as it’s got power, materials, and whatever is necessary for basic safety like noble gas for sintering safety, you’re set. Even accounting systems are able to usually run fairly independently. It’s not that IT and business and manufacturing support software engineers don’t help, but they aren’t necessary, especially if they’re just making the same thing over and over.
crinkly 1y ago
In the late-90s I worked for a manufacturing company in a firmware dev capacity. They did everything on paper still. They migrated successfully to an in-house built ERP system sitting on top of Oracle. Big celebration, everyone happy. Six months later someone drove a forklift through the wall of the machine room into the UPS which caught fire and destroyed three racks of kit including the Oracle node. Turns out no one really trusted the system and was running paper on the side. When I left 6 years later they were still doing it on paper and reporting on Excel. It works and is considerably more forklift proof.
- braggerxyz 1y ago
  Forklift-Proof ERP was not on my bingo card. Thanks for the laugh :D
mrweasel 1y ago
In the late 90s, early 2000, the Danish department of defence decided that they needed a new procurement system, DeMars, built on SAP. I know a sergent that worked in procurement at the time, he made insanely large purchases of everything he was responsible for in the months leading up to the launch. It came to the point where he was pulled in for questioning, on the suspicion of fraud. He explained that he had no faith in the launch of DeMars and wanted to ensure that stock would not run out. Everything was accounted for, if anyone believe that he as committing fraud, they where welcome to do a complete inventory. DeMars launched, and procurement basically stopped for a year. Only the items my friend was in charge of remained in stock, through out the launch/roll-out process.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  When HP converted to SAP, I think their production basically stopped, for six months, and they lost $400 million. Switching to a new system; even when it is for the better, is a painful, expensive process. The company that I worked for, did a successful transition to SAP, but it took about two years, and a lot of butthurt.
  - cluckindan 1y ago
    Switching to SAP ERP was already an in-joke level of well-known catastrophe in IT consulting circles 20 years ago. I’m glad to see nothing has changed in that respect.
  - mensetmanusman 1y ago
    Sap adds so much syrup to the gears of business that it kills some.
  - mrweasel 1y ago
    I feel like a ton of SAP transitions only succeed because they have to.
  - pradn 1y ago
    They say its easier to change your company to fit SAP than to mold SAP to fit your company.
perlgeek 1y ago
On the other hand, once you have a well-established IT automation around your production, and people aren't trained in pre-automation production, it's actually quite hard to go back to manual. Probably also depends on the complexity of the orders and workflows.
worldsayshi 1y ago
Excel has the benefit of being understandable and fixable by a lot of regular office workers. It's a bit surprising that we don't have that feature as a requirement for most IT infrastructure. It would make it so much more usable.
- rubyfan 1y ago
  Agree. IT has forgotten that computing should enable more people to be producers instead of mere consumers. IT management cares about control, audit, permissions and expense - no focus on achieving productivity in the workplace and in many cases are anti-user.
  - ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
    If you try running a business where several workers get involved with fixing and extending information systems (e.g. spreadsheets), you'll soon understand why successful IT management cares about controls, audits and permissions.
- jjani 1y ago
  Most of those office workers were not capable of fixing anything on the first day they used Excel. Many didn't understand it at all. The main difference isn't that Excel is super accessible and easy to use for non-technical people; it's its ubiquity, and especially that of training on its usage.
  - worldsayshi 1y ago
    Ubiquity is important but it's not the only important factor. An excel sheet can typically be downloaded and experimented with. You can't download an ERP system and try stuff with it.
- mark-r 1y ago
  I know a manufacturing plant that used an Excel spreadsheet to do all its production planning. There was only one person who understood the spreadsheet and could modify it, a consultant who made more than the plant manager. "Understandable and fixable" depends more on the complexity of the application rather than the fact it's in Excel.
frteger 1y ago
Working for a manufacturing company, you may be making drone parts, and you don’t really know which side of the war you’re making them for, because they can buy individual parts through different reputable-looking companies. You could also be making surgical parts that help save lives. Overall though, I think I’d rather be making nice practical furniture that hopefully people would never throw away. While I support people that want to protect, war is horrible.
cluckindan 1y ago
Without software, drones are useless. I suppose they can still assemble manually operated quadcopters if they know their inventory by heart, but they will be unable to produce more parts by 3D printing or drones capable of stable flight, autonomous operations, surveillance or any more advanced use cases. Even remote control is probably out of the picture.
- greelin 1y ago
  They can continue to run the same thing they had before. As an old software engineer, I can say with certainty that software engineering is a very, VERY wasteful practice. We could all be running Windows 3 right now, DOS, or some old Unix. The overhead involved in making actual advancements shows our slow progress as a species, and that we’re in a thread discussing a drone manufacturing facility being blown up in a war and how much that matters. I think the natives had it right to live off of the land peacefully, and if anything to devote full time on science to determining what we do to help life survive in the universe.
  - ordu 1y ago
    Ahh... Philosophy... I can't agree with you. People have got their human mind as a result of ever increasing and self-inflicted costs driven by a competition among males. They developed minds to play politics and they came to a point when 20% of metabolism of human body was devoted to its brain. The result of such a wasteful way to spend their energy resources? Humans colonized all the Earth, drove to the extinction almost all big animals, and now there are as much humans on the Earth as mosquitos. Looks like a win, doesn't it? These things go off the rails sometimes. Just today I've found a new example to it: highlanders who had practiced brutal initiation ceremonies “in which they were forced to drink only partly slaked lime that blistered their mouths and throats, were beaten with stinging nettles, were denied water, had barbed grass pushed up their urethras to cause bleeding, were compelled to swallow bent lengths of cane until vomiting was induced, and were required to fellate older men, who also had anal intercourse with them” gave them up after only minimal contact with outside disapproval. Some later told anthropologists they felt “deeply shamed” by their treatment of their own sons and were relieved to stop.[1] The waste of resources into useless things doesn't lead to good outcomes each time, but I believe that software engineering will lead to something. I'm not Jesus, I can't predict exactly what the beneficial results will be, but at least I can point to a growing ability of engineers of handling complexity. It lags behind their ability to create complexity, but still it grows. [1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-arguments-about-aborigines https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-arguments-about...
tantalor 1y ago
> Obviously IT infrastructure is not needed for manufacturing Is this sarcasm?
dmix 1y ago
> The migration of ERP system gone wrong and nobody knows how to fix it. I swear this is SAPs main business model Just endless consulting bills to set it up then fix it when it's delivered in a broken state.
- torginus 1y ago
  That and 'if you don't use SAP you're not compliant with EU regulation XYZ and we won't do business with you'
littlestymaar 1y ago
Reminds me of the Louvois[1] disaster in the French armed forces, they fucked the payment system so bad they had to roll back to manual accounting for a moment. Yes, for the whole French Army, which was at the time involved in multiple foreign operations… [1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logiciel_unique_%C3%A0_vocation_interarm%C3%A9es_de_la_solde https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logiciel_unique_%C3%A0_vocatio...
bearjaws 1y ago
I worked for a company that was working on rolling out D365 for 2 years :) I was acquired by a company that was working on Sales Force integration for 3 years, I left before it was fully functional. They had 4 full time devs working on Sales Force, meanwhile we had built the entire company in a year with 4 devs.

v5v3 1y ago

>Ukrainian cyber activists, in cooperation with military intelligence... So the foreign intelligence services gave them a button push so it's not a direct cyber war on Russia.

gghffguhvc 1y ago
Likely. But also could have been some thugs with a wrench in a basement and the sys admin giving up the ssh keys and 2fa etc.
- HenryBemis 1y ago
  It's Ukraine. Are you aware of the "banks' debt collectors"? They had thugs knocking on your door (and your face) for an overdue loan payment; they would _of course_ use violence/torture to extract information.
  - HenryBemis 1y ago
    Whoah.. -4.. Fun fact, I was internal auditor in a bank (I will not specify the year(s) for safety/privacy). We did the due diligence and ended up buying a Ukrainian bank. Part of the 'collections' was really to smash people's faces. Believe it or not. But sure.. you know best.
    - wiseowise 1y ago
      Guess whose influence and where it comes from?
      - fennecbutt 1y ago
        Yup, I feel like Ukraine has been trying to break away from the society is a meat grinder culture of Russia for a while and the war has made if clear who's on what side locally. My only qualm with them is their not so great support for gay people, but then during the war ofc the party line is now they love their gay soldiers. Would have been nice to see more action around that beforehand but I get it. Even other first world countries still have plenty of problems as a gay person, especially gay men.

HenryBemis 1y ago

I remember Steve Gibson saying some years back that the only reason USA doesn't (cyber-)'attack' Russia's train infra is the inability to 'hide the traces' of the attack, and it would be 'easily' attributed/mapped back to the USA causing (political) issues. Well, Ukraine doesn't have 'that' challenge. On the other hand (and I'm not defending a drone company), anyone that has a business should know by now that ransomware (with our without deletion) is a real thing, and it's not an 'if' question, it's a 'when' question. I have never worked with/for a Russian company, so it would be interesting to hear/read from someone who has, how 'well organized' are they? GRC-wise. Assuming that someone would run the COBIT framework on them (Russian companies), would the 'average' be 'ok' or it's a big mess (kinda like working for an EU company in early 00's)?

podgorniy 1y ago
> I remember Steve Gibson saying some years back that the only reason USA doesn't (cyber-)'attack' Russia's train infra is the inability to 'hide the traces' of the attack This is not a real reason. This explanation hides the real reason: Russia is a valuable geopolitical partner for USA. Regarless who are in power in USA - all presidents tried to make deals/contacts with Russia. There is no value for USA in getting Russia loose this war, have internal instability or split in 20-ish national states. USA wins more from russia being as it is today with all it blood, suffering and hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by the regime thrive for survival. Actually USA are afraid to push too much to cause internal issues in Russia. And russian ruling class knows that.
perlgeek 1y ago
I guess another reason is that there isn't too much IT infrastructure that Russian trains depend on. There are ticket sales systems for people being transported, but much is freight trains, and if there was an easy way to disrupt that, you can be sure that Ukraine would've done it by now, because the Russian military heavily depends on rail-based supplies.
arthur-st 1y ago
I did work for a Russian financial multinational just before COVID-19, as a native Russian speaker, and it was a free-for-all mess interally. The IT side had a load-bearing, old-school sysadmin type with a personality for heroics.

raverbashing 1y ago

While this is a move that will hinder production for a while I'd say maybe they should have been more creative They should have checked the source codes and added some changes to make drones unpredictably unreliable "Oh this totally innocent code change? Oh look it makes the gps act weird if longitude is between a certain range how weird"

WJW 1y ago
When there's hundreds of drones raining down on your civilians every day, just disabling the production has a a higher priority than being cutesy with things that might work further away into the future.
- _1tem 1y ago
  In several cases during World War II, the Allies intentionally allowed German attacks to happen (or did not act to prevent them) to avoid revealing that they had cracked German codes, particularly the Enigma cipher.
  - mcintyre1994 1y ago
    I don't think that's comparable because the Allies hoped cracking Enigma would reveal other secrets in the future. Ukraine probably aren't worried that Russia are going to do something else more worth interrupting with their drones in the future.
  - jcranmer 1y ago
    Actually, I don't think that's known to have ever happened. The Allies protected Ultra intelligence by parallel construction--coming up with other means to 'discover' the same information (principally, sending a reconnaissance flight to the known location of wolf packs). The main claim for this myth is the sacrifice of Coventry during the Battle of Britain, but as far as I'm aware, historians are in general agreement that Ultra was unable to ascertain that Coventry was the target before the raid took place.

bettercallsalad 1y ago

[flagged]

praptak 1y ago

Not many companies explicitly prepare for the scenario where every single data storage unit in the company is effectively wiped and you have to redeploy from zero. If you never bootstrap from zero (nor simulate this) then your systems probably have cycles in their deployment dependencies. Your config pusher is deployed from Jenkins/Puppet/Ansible but 2 years ago someone made Jenkins dependent on the config pusher for its own config. Now you cannot just deploy these systems in order, you have to replay the history before that change.

thyristan 1y ago
Almost everything will have cycles in IT. People want and security requires some kind of SSO. Now SSO is a dependency for almost everything, including the administration of underlying systems that run SSO. Same for the network. Same for a lot of things. Bootstrapping from zero will never be easy and will always take some time. I don't think you can prepare your way out of this, short of preparing a fully redundant, fully separate secondary infrastructure.
- pferde 1y ago
  This is called "break-glass procedure" in enterprise IT (as in "break glass in case of emergency"), and often consists of independent, normally unused, admin accounts on key systems, access info for which is locked in some safe location, e.g. physical safe in a secure location. Testing this reliably is difficult, though, and often these procedures and their documentation is outdated.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- praptak 1y ago
  I agree that fully redundant & separate infrastructure is unrealistic. I'm also not saying you can be 100% prepared. My point is that you can improve your posture. What you can do is to have a sandbox environment where you periodically do a full setup exercise from a prepper disk. Conceptually it's not that different from testing backup recovery (ok, most companies neglect this too, so maybe you have a point :) ).

nrvn 1y ago

cybersecurity 101: - know your threats - assess your risks based on identified threats - backup 3-2-1 strategy (3 copies of your data on 2 independent storage places with 1 copy offline and offsite) - "build the world from scratch" plan with the assumption that all infra is completely and irreversibly destroyed. - assume you have already been hacked but you don't yet know about it. Build your indicators of compromise based on that simple assumption. Observing how some "groups of people" act in a totally ignorant fashion is amusing.

grishka 1y ago

That's a very odd website. Blocked by the Russian government so you get a TLS error, once you get past that, you get the Cloudflare "you are blocked" page, and then you use a VPN and... get the option to read this article in Russian.

sofixa 1y ago
Doesn't sound like it's the fault of the website, but of your government and maybe CloudFlare (although they could be blocking you because of the TLS error's underlying reason, not because you're in Russia).
- grishka 1y ago
  No, that page is always a sign that the person who configured Cloudflare for their website has chosen to deliberately block Russian IPs.
ivan_gammel 1y ago
The linked page is in English, but speaking of the option - residents of Russian Federation probably were not a target audience of Russian version of this website anyway. Contrary to some popular beliefs in Russia about language wars, many people still do speak Russian in Ukraine and media do publish articles in Russian.
- orbital-decay 1y ago
  >residents of Russian Federation probably were not a target audience of Russian version of this website anyway Deliberately blocking the supposed enemy from hearing you does strike me as irrational, though. The mere fact they're doing Russian censors' job should probably make them recheck if they got anything wrong in their decision process, just in case.
  - falcor84 1y ago
    What makes you think that it's the Ukranians that are blocking Russian users from accessing it?

BrandoElFollito 1y ago

I run a small home lab, about 30 services One day I decided to change my main disk and used the opportunity to rebuild everything from scratch and from backups. I was up in about an hour. And then I spent a week fixing this and that, ah yes I changed that too and, crap, I cannot remember why this thingie is set up this way. And some more. This is a one-man lab, with simple services, all on docker. I also work in IT. Recovering from scratch a whole infrastructure managed by many people over the years is a titanic task. I helped to recover my nearby hospital as a volunteer when it was ransomwared. The poor two IT guys over there has no idea how to recover and the official help was pityful. I also helped with a ransomware attack on a large company. The effort people had to do to remember why something was that way, or just remember whatever was colossal. Sure a lot of things were "documented" and "tested" but reality hit hard.

WhyNotHugo 1y ago
Modern IT practices don’t really contemplate disaster recovery. Even organisations with strict backup procedures seldom test recovery (most never at all). Everything is quickly strapped together due to teams being understaffed. Preparing infrastructure in a way such that it can easily be recreated is easily twice the effort as “just” setting it up the usual way.
- andrelaszlo 1y ago
  Just the other day one of my clients had a production critical server failing and we started restoring it from backups. Turns out some of the software running on it had some weird licensing checks tied to the hardware so it refused to start on the new server. It turns out that the company that made this important piece of software doesn't even exist anymore.
  - tialaramex 1y ago
    Virtualization really helps. We have a lot of weird software which requires hardware dongles, but they're all USB dongles and they're all virtualized, one of the DC racks has a few U worth of just USB socket -> dongle wired up so that if we spin up a VM it can say "Hey, give me a USB socket with a FooCorp OmniBloat dongle on it" and get one unless they're all used.

frou_dh 1y ago

I wonder to what extent either side is worried about the firmware on the drones. Somehow getting tampered-with firmware onto the drones that your enemy is using seems like it would be valuable.

benterix 1y ago
Very interesting but risky (easy to discover and renders the whole operation ineffective). So I believe what they did was heavy-handed but the most reasonable.
trebligdivad 1y ago
Yeh, it would seem in some ways more useful than shutting down the factory; if you gently made all the drones do something, like let them be remote controlled, or bomb the place they were launched from.
- fennecbutt 1y ago
  But once that happened a handful of times it would be corrected. I suppose it could be used sparingly but Ukraine would have no way of knowing when to use it. Perhaps a Bluetooth or whatever else the drone has on board "keep away" beacon for vips.
  - jncfhnb 1y ago
    You say that, but Israel booby trapped the Hezbollah comm devices _twice_ with physical explosives.
  - Faark 1y ago
    There are tones of non-obvious options. Eg make it appear like being shoot-downs. With a bunch of RNG / logic to make it non-obvious... random percentage, only when getting close to target, so many ways... The real enemy is QA. Don't want it misbehaving during a virtual test flight.
morkalork 1y ago
One funny tick that's supposedly appeared is installing viruses on the SD cards used in drones so if/when a drone is downed intact and picked up by a curious enemy, their computer is infected.

helge9210 1y ago

AI translation (to English) is off in places. "Ukrainian cybercriminals" is not in the original and was picked as the translation of the closest sounding full word.

littlestymaar 1y ago

> The attack destroyed over 47 TB of critical data, I'm very dubious that there would be such an amount of “critical” data pretty much anywhere, besides the banking and insurance sector. And particularly not at a drone manufacturer.

zulban 1y ago
Training data like audio, pictures, and video perhaps.
Mashimo 1y ago
Probably added all raw disk sizes together. Or all the data, including duplicates.
- littlestymaar 1y ago
  Exactly.
dogleash 1y ago
Depends on how you slice it. If you focus only on data with high-uptime requirements, no probably not 50 TB. If you include low-uptime requirement but low-replaceability stuff like all the products' mechanical, electrical and software designs, documentation and artifacts? Easily 50 TB.

Garvi 1y ago

[flagged]

submeta 1y ago

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wiseowise 1y ago
> It’s a proxy war fought by the US and it‘s vassals (aka allies) and Russia. That’s the spirit, comrade. Remember! When it’s decadent West/NATO, they’re vassals. When it is glorious BRICS, they’re allies. Don’t mix them up! Good luck!
- submeta 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - AnimalMuppet 1y ago
    > Look at how Trump talks about annexing Greenland. He speaks out what other US politicians have been hiding behind diplomatic wording. Hardly. He is very much not a normal US politician, and not just because he says what others were thinking. No, he's abnormal because he thinks what nobody else was thinking.
  - cosmicgadget 1y ago
    Here's the wonderful thing: he'll be gone in 3.5 years or less. You're stuck with your guy until he dies because like the people that voted for Trump, you don't mind abject corruption if you get the appearance of strength. The difference is, annexing Greenland is just bluster to distract from the corruption. You guys actually invaded Ukraine and are paying dearly for it.
    - submeta 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - cosmicgadget 1y ago
        No I am very familiar with the Russian "I'm not political" crowd. The personal attack is fun though, do you have wounded nationalist pride?

LongjumpingCat 1y ago

[flagged]

kattagarian 1y ago
thank you for your AI-generated answer!
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
doublerabbit 1y ago
> demonstrates how cyber operations are now deeply integrated into military strategy. This isn't new. Cyber attacks have always been used in military strategy since their existence.

mattxxx 1y ago

Weird thing: the timestamp on the upper right part of the camera is "01-02-1970" :thinking_face:

mycall 1y ago
One day or one month past UNIX Epoch
jug 1y ago
Day 1 after the start of the Unix epoch. Looks like a clock with unset/reset date that has had one day pass.

aaron695 1y ago

[dead]

cyber1 1y ago

Glory to Ukraine! Slava Ukraini!

drweevil 1y ago

And we believe this why? A Ukrainian web site, no independent corroboration. All righty then.

giingyui 1y ago
[dead]

red-iron-pine 1y ago

are the raw files available online?

alexandrutocar 1y ago
i would not think so as it involves technology with a military application.

roody15 1y ago

Ukrainian hackers ….? Hmm

93po 1y ago

The source of this news is the Ukrainian military which seems to exaggerate and spread propaganda (as does every other country of course). I don't know why we accept this information as reliable.

consumer451 1y ago
I am genuinely curious, what are the known examples of them exaggerating and spreading propaganda, regarding operations like this?
- 93po 1y ago
  Ghost of Kyiv was recognized by Ukraine itself as a myth. Snake Island "go fuck yourself" was misrepresented (they were killed vs captured), plenty of others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_in_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine#Ukrainian_themes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_in_the_Russian_... There's also just endless small stuff (shorts/tiktoks/cam footage) on social media (reddit) that really does not pass the sniff test. I think what Russia is doing is terrible, I am not defending them at all. I am just allergic to bullshit, and there is plenty of smelly things happening on the Ukrainian side, though of course I recognize the Russians are especially bad in this regard.
  - consumer451 1y ago
    The ghost of Kyiv was recognized as a myth at the time of it's spread. The Snake Island story is understandable. Every country makes mistakes about KIA vs. MIA. I was not very clear, but I meant Ukrainian intelligence services claiming operational success where there was none. It's also interesting that this Wikipedia entry appears devoid of UA false propaganda after 2022. I wonder if they realized that this was not a good Wiki entry on which to appear.
    - 93po 1y ago
      it is worth something if it's recognized as a myth by official sources at the time, but it doesn't change that social media (reddit) was absolutely jammed full of stuff about it, presenting it as factual, and has led probably millions of people to believe it was real. and even beyond the posts that were explicitly about it, comment sections continued to refer to it in serious ways. my whole point is there is a concerted effort to spread it as an "us vs them" narrative, with ukraine being the "us" part (as an american). what i ultimately care about is manipulation, because manipulation and disinformation erode democracy, and it's overwhelmingly done by the rich and powerful and at the expense of the working class. there are endless billions of dollars getting funneled into the military industrial complex around ukraine, and the more americans align with ukraine, and the more americans can feel invested and interested in the war in happy-feel-good-ways (like having heroes and "fuck russia" moments) the more americans are okay with their tax dollars getting spent this way. whatever machinery is at play here has very successfully captured the support of a massive part of the American left, and the same people you see protesting about the environment are the same people you see waiving ukraine flags and being manipulated into suddenly being pro-war despite being against things like the war in iraq. billionaires continue to make their billions, people continue to believe what they read on reddit and watch on corporate news, and the narrative is always things that aren't class consciousness.

dmix 1y ago

Here is a translated version of the telegram message posted by the hacking team: > LLC “Gaskar Integration” (Gaskar Group)—one of the largest UAV manufacturers in Russia—has just been penetrated right down to the tonsils in the course of demilitarization and denazification. > VO Team, together with the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance (https://t.me/UCAgroup https://t.me/UCAgroup) and another very well‑known organization whose mere mention makes the vatniks’ bottle‑openings burst (https://gur.gov.ua/ https://gur.gov.ua/), carried out large‑scale operations: we seized all of Gaskar Group’s network and server infrastructure, gathered valuable data on their current and prospective UAVs, destroyed that data, and knocked the entire infrastructure offline. > By the way, from the information we obtained, the PRC is helping Gaskar Group with production and staff training. China transferred technology for the newest UAVs—technology that is now in our hands . > VO Team focused on wiping out the production complex’s infrastructure. On‑site we erased more than 250 hosts (4 ESXi servers, 46 virtual servers, 200+ workstations) and bricked about 20 MikroTik devices. In total we destroyed 47 TB of valuable data at Gaskar Group—including 10 TB of backups—and disabled all production and auxiliary systems. > The scum at Gaskar Group have the blood of hundreds of Ukrainian children, women, and elderly on their hands. That’s why we went after this target with special zeal. We now possess the lists of ALL employees, their home addresses, information about their family members, and much more… We’re in your home computers and phones—we’re everywhere . Not a single bastard from Gaskar Group will escape responsibility! > The sword of Damocles already hangs by a thin thread over your heads. It’s too late to spew excuses like “we’re apolitical” or “we were just making money”…. > The whole world can see that the so‑called Russian Federation has strategically lost everything. Defeat and collapse of that unwashed entity are only a matter of time. VO Team is collecting data on everyone involved in Putin’s criminal war—the deaths of our children, mothers, and all Ukrainians. Retribution is inevitable and is drawing near!

consumer451 1y ago
> China transferred technology for the newest UAVs—technology that is now in our hands Well, this is quite the interesting tidbit. Thanks for posting the translation.

Kapura 1y ago

Cyber warfare is really reaching a new peak in Ukraine, and not just the more-traditional cyberattacks like this. The target is of note; the drones themselves are the thing that's setting this war apart from all of the primarily human powered wars of the past centuries. Drones have revolutionized reconnaissance, sabotage, and munitions interception. Relative to their material cost, they can be terrifically destructive, and with the advances in image recognition in the past decade some are able to operate even when affected by electronic signal jamming. This is some very cyberpunk shit going on right now. This was obviously a very high-value target, and Ukraine has shown themselves again to be masters of asymmetric warfare: taking out a sizable chunk of Russia's long range bombers using drones smuggled across Russia, and now impacting one of the centers of Russia's drone manufacturing. It is difficult to see how the war will end, but it is clear that Ukraine is not about to stop fighting.

jncfhnb 1y ago
Remains to be seen if the lessons of this war extend to other possible wars though. It is possible that FPV drones are showing up as so important because Russia is committed to a disgusting meat sluice of fodder to achieve its marginal territory gains. Most countries don’t have the appetite for those kind of losses. Most countries, frankly, don’t have the audacity to set these kinds of war aims. I predict they won’t matter too much to the war meta. At least not so much as cheap long range jet drones which are also becoming significant here.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  Seems like drone warfare is just democratizing what e.g the US has in capabilities with their precision munitions already, in a perhaps less capable but far cheaper manner. Put it in other words if this was the US directy engaging russia, it would probably be tomahawk missiles or something along those lines just like we’ve seen last few decades, vs a sort of Air Hogs with a bomb.
  - jncfhnb 1y ago
    Nah it would still be FPV drones The question is how useful would these things be if your opponent wasn’t blindly rushing forward? The role of this tech is effectively a dynamic minefield more or less

rclkrtrzckr 1y ago

I am working for a medium sized Swiss company. We're coding our own ERP, based on a nightmare of a stack. We call it "security by confusion". An attacker would maybe find its way in, but he'll never find the way out. If he destroys 90% of our code, we'll still be up and running, because 95% of the codebase is obsolete.

akudha 1y ago
lol, I don’t know if this is scary or impressive :)
barbazoo 1y ago
This sounds like the kind of resiliency that a process like evolution would create :)
m4rtink 1y ago
Real world ICE barier! :D
boznz 1y ago
Have coded a couple of full MRP systems for various large companies based on my own model and I would be intrigued to see how this will work. I usually include the default recommended security and DR practices and then add my own OTP-hash based layer for key authorisations. I thought I was paranoid, but your system sounds more like an end-of-the-world scenario rather than just keep the production-line going in the factory.
sam_goody 1y ago
There was an interview with some U.S. army rep. that was pretty famous a few years back. He said that even if hackers broke in to the U.S. systems they wouldn't achieve anything due to how old, convoluted and buggy the systems were - even we who have full access can barely get anything to work!! Of course, that was said purposefully, and may not reflect the truth at all. But still, the thought that that is security for some (and I am sure it is for someone, somewhere) is kind of an extension of security by obscurity that is scary.

geoffbp 1y ago

How many drones would they have destroyed? Couldn’t find that on the article

hosh 1y ago

The headline of the article called these people cyber activists, and in the text of the article, they were called cybercriminals. Which is it? It reminds me a bit with the situation with privateers during the age of sail. These were often people operating at the edge of the law, or even outright outlaws, given a letter of marque, a license to raid warships and commerce against a specific adversary. I'm sure out on the high seas, abuses happen. The people who put together the doctrine on 4th Generation Warfare talked about the blurring of civilian and military. Rules of engagement gets fuzzier.

deleted 1y ago
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torlok 1y ago
Russians are kiling civilians with drones each day. I don't think this is some gray area hybrid warfare, it's just regular people not wanting drones to kill their neighbours.
- Mars008 1y ago
  > Russians are kiling civilians with drones each day. Same do Ukrainians, don't they? More over, long before they killed civilians and defenders in Iraq and Afghanistan on Americans invitation. Then left without even saying 'sorry'. Since 2014 they were shelling Donetsk just for fun, killing people at random. So, it's more complicated than you'll find in western mass media. Especially in EU where full picture is illegal.
  - SetTheorist 1y ago
    No, they do not. Ukrainians have not and do not deliberately target civilians in their war of self-defense against the invading russian army. Russia consistently and deliberately targets civilians. There is no "both sides" here.
    - Mars008 1y ago
      > Ukrainians have not and do not deliberately target civilians There news on Russian side daily of Ukrainians doing exactly this, deliberately targeting civilians. Also usually their own non-combatants who are trying to surrender. This is war crime. There are dirty tactics in this war which western public will learn about later. For now it's given a rosy optimistic picture approved by Zelinsky office. That's how 'Support Ukraine' is pushed on them. In fact it's 'support the war', as Ukrainians are dying in big numbers. By the way, official number of civilians killed 3 years is lower that in Gaza in 3 months.

baby 1y ago

What's interesting is that this whole challenge is making Russia stronger. Russia has increased its military industry and its now running full steam. Every attack is giving them an opportunity to harden. All of that is meaningless if it makes Russia stronger and more resilient to embargos and cyber/physical attacks in the long run. For all of this to have meaning it has to have a fall of USSR kind of impact at some point, otherwise we just strengthened one of the world's most dangerous state.

immibis 1y ago
Are they? They're running at full stream and yet they're still in a years-long stalemate in Ukraine? Authoritarian governments always fail, because they get used to achieving everything by simply ordering it to be achieved, while the laws of physics don't obey orders. Meanwhile they're murdering how many of their own soldiers per day?
brentm 1y ago
Of course but also Ukraine doesn't have the privilege to care about the long term right now. You can't lose the battle today to win the war that you may never live to fight.
- baby 1y ago
  I agree, I just think we should do more than just helping Ukraine
zaptheimpaler 1y ago
Russia recently announced that they want to import millions of immigrants now, likely because they massacred a big chunk of their young workforce. Their economy and production capacity is slowly crumbling, political dissent is rising. I don't think they're getting stronger.
tim333 1y ago
It's just a feature of long running wars that both sides boost their military. Russia is stronger in some ways but weaker in others.

nicholast 1y ago

The only tech that scales cheaper than drones are digital interventions. This is a better way to intercept.

madebywelch 1y ago

I'm curious if they ever practiced any sort of disaster recovery scenarios.

dopa42365 1y ago

>GASKAR INTEGRATION Definitely one of the companies that everyone has heard of before. No need to mention any of their brand or product names, they're that famous. $3 million revenue in 2024. I'm sure we'll hear more about the epic defeat of this major military supplier in the future.

datameta 1y ago
Cynical sarcasm so thick, one could spread it with a spoon. What do you get from trying to devalue the successful outcome?

hdb385 1y ago

Ukraine winning again! lol

garfieldnate 1y ago

Anyone else amused by the date on the picture being 1 day from the beginning of the Unix epoch?

ropable 1y ago

I'd bet that their stickiest problem will be restoring and replacing all the weird IT-OT interface parts (e.g. some random Windows 98 box which is the only thing can run the CNC). No one ever thinks to document or back up those things.

ShadowBanThis03 1y ago

The world's civilized countries should unite to wipe out Russia's IT infrastructure.

gianpaj 1y ago

"Additionally, all doors at the drone production plant have been locked, forcing employees to use fire exits."

Techrecovery 1y ago

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SandyBauman 1y ago

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