11 ms·
For what purpose? Cui bono?
by HPsquared 9mo ago
For what purpose? Cui bono?
- breve 9mo agoRussia is at war with Europe.
- dijit 9mo agobefore anyone jumps on the pedantry bandwagon, its worth noting that even though open war hasn’t been called: the attacks on infrastructure especially cyber warfare is extremely active and, crucially, direct. It is totally fair to say that in a digital context, Russia is absolutely at war with Europe. As far as I can tell, they don’t even try to hide it.
- reactordev 9mo agoNot to mention the information war they have been waging globally since 2016
- naryJane 9mo agoTrue, but they’ve certainly been doing it much longer than ten years. I’ll never forget this headline [0] that struck me as purely devilish, especially in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election. Combine that with the knowledge that Trump has been anti-NATO since the 1980s [1]. Who knows how long Russia has been nudging him along. Who knows how many avenues they traverse? Take for example the letter to Senator Tom Cotton about Greenland [2]. What an embarrassment. I can only hope we are equally successful in our own PsyOps. [0] https://www.rt.com/news/265399-putin-nato-europe-ukraine-italy/ https://www.rt.com/news/265399-putin-nato-europe-ukraine-ita... [1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ilanbenmeir/that-time-trump-spent-nearly-100000-on-an-ad-criticizing-us https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ilanbenmeir/that-time-t... [2] https://monitoring.bbc.co.uk/product/c2018djo https://monitoring.bbc.co.uk/product/c2018djo
- reactordev 9mo agoYou don’t remember Trump Moscow? Ivanka? Trump and Russian connections go all the way back to Epstein’s early days.
- mrtesthah 9mo agoSo much dirt. https://spookyconnections.com/2024/10/19/donald-trump/ https://spookyconnections.com/2024/10/19/donald-trump/
- Applejinx 9mo agoYes, and it's successfully got to where his people are able to dismantle American infrastructure at scale, deliver IT systems to Russian hackers directly and coordinate death squads on the streets. I figure the primary reason we're not seeing 'little green men' in Minnesota, for instance, is that Russia cannot spare them. But the war here is arguably as important or MORE important to Russian war aims than the war in Ukraine. Certainly more successful here than in Ukraine, for what that's worth. I don't think it's a foregone conclusion but they've certainly succeeded here a lot more than in Ukraine.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- Avamander 9mo agoIt has been ramping up a bit. Most recent case has been Russian (sock)puppet activity on Wikipedia, where they actively try to rewrite the language used, the narrative to be more suitable for them. It has even gotten news coverage. First link in English I found: https://balticsentinel.eu/8394326/wikipedia-s-baltic-battle-estonian-journalists-warn-of-coordinated-pro-soviet-edits-lithuania-reports-similar-targeting https://balticsentinel.eu/8394326/wikipedia-s-baltic-battle-...
- exoverito 9mo agoThe US, UK, and Western powers have been waging information war for far longer than 2016. Look at Canadian PM Mark Carney's latest speech at Davos, he admits the 'Rules based international order' was a fiction, and the US has had a very long history of covert operations, 'enhanced interrogation', destabilization campaigns, funding of terrorists, propping up of dictators, bombing and invading of many countries... To be specific consider how many lies have been told by the American mainstream media around the narratives of Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Syria, Libya, etc. Israel has the most surveilled and well defended border in the world, the Mossad is sophisticated enough to launch pager attacks to decapitate Hezbollah leadership, yet somehow they got caught with their pants down and Hamas combatants could raid their country for 12 hours without a response. The US also had funded Osama bin Laden in the 1980s, knew Al Qaeda was plotting another attack on the WTC, and the Neocons in the Bush administration wanted a new Pearl Harbor as outlined in the Project for a New American Century. Russia is not uniquely or even particularly evil here, it's entirely rational for them to not want a major neighbor to join an enemy alliance. Look at how America has treated Cuba for decades. People should stop being so naive.
- Throaway1982 9mo agoUnfortunately its also entirely rational for Ukraine to want to join an alliance against Russia!
- tosapple 9mo agoWhat I am starting to appreciate about these digital infrastructure attacks is that they may be reversible and or temporary. It can be a nice feature.
- jacquesm 9mo agoThen you're missing the point. If they succeed they may well not be reversible. The question is if this had succeeded would we have shrugged it off again or responded appropriately?
- tosapple 9mo agoI wasn't commenting on any particular case. I was stating that flipping a switch is less costly to reverse than blowing up a dam.
- jacquesm 9mo agoThese attacks are not at the level of 'flipping a switch'. If they succeed they can destabilize the grid and that has the potential to destroy gear, and while not as costly as blowing up a dam it can still be quite costly.
- tosapple 9mo agoDuring WW2 both germany and the UK as example were carpet bombed to assail industry, does that help you to understand my position better? Vietnam too.
- shakna 9mo agoNot really. If you succeed in attacking the grid, you achieve the same widespread industry impact, without the cost of the munitions. It can take decades to recover from a cyber attack like this, if it succeeds.
- 9mo ago
- throw310822 9mo ago[flagged]
- bnjemian 9mo agoThis completely ignores that: 1. Russia was the aggressor in Ukraine, 2. Putin has made clear his desire to pursue expansionist goals through military action targeting prior members of the Soviet Union, 3. Putin regular threatens nuclear war with Ukraine, 4. Russia has shown outward hostility towards Western democracies and sought to manipulate elections with information warfare to reach their goals (most notably, 2016 US Election and Brexit), 5. Russian regularly cuts cables connecting countries, and 6. Though completely unrelated, Putin has a history of assassinating political opponents. That's wolfish behavior if I've ever seen it.
- Zagitta 9mo agoYou're conveniently omitting these all happened in response to the full scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. But thanks for proving the point about Russia's disinformation war.
- throw310822 9mo ago[flagged]
- RealityVoid 9mo agoDid you actually read all the posts pointing this and all the _other_ aggressive actions Russia is taking against the EU? Regardless, Russia is a bully and sticking your head in the sand won't make them go away.
- cookiengineer 9mo agoSome could say that in the cyber realm, they are not petty, ya! Well, or something like that. Eversince notpetya and the colonial pipeline hack, the cyber strategy game changed a lot. Notpetya was genius as a deployment, because they abused the country's tax software deployment pipeline to cripple all (and I mean all, beyond 99%) businesses in one surgical strike. The same is gonna happen to other tax software providers, because the DATEV AG and similar companies are pretty much the definition of digital incompetence wherever you look. I could name other takedowns but the list would continue beyond a reasonable comment, especially with vendors like Hercules and Prophete that are now insolvent because they never prioritized cyber security at all, got hacked, didn't have backups, and ran out of money due to production plant costs.
- RobotToaster 9mo agoThe cold war never ended
- 127 9mo ago...for Putin
- brabel 9mo agoEurope is the main supplier of weapons to Ukraine which is in actual war with Russia. Of course Russia is at war with Europe, the only reason bombs are not falling in Poland and Germany is that Russia wouldn’t have the capability to defend itself against retaliation. Do people really believe their countries can openly take sides in a war and not be targeted??
- hardlianotion 9mo agoThis has been going on from well before the Ukraine war. It has just intensified. The real question is: should the affected states develop some counter-capability to deter this opportunistic behaviour?
- yetihehe 9mo agoFortunately Russia in their benevolence tries to limit the damage, so that we don't feel the destruction all at once. This means some people will be annoyed for day or two and everyone is reminded to increase security pretty constantly. Just recently we got news about ONE furnace (from several in that heating plant) being probably hacked. The furnace shut down. Operator didn't notice, because the display on furnace was already malfunctioning and operator just restarted it. They checked everything only after our "cybersecurity" forces notified them. That was in local news this weekend. I know about it because I'm responsible for another city heating network, we take security pretty seriously. All devices are in vpn and if someone outside needs to login remotely, he is granted access only for the time needed, so window for actually worming the network through vendors is very small. All staff accessing the system has computer security training. But not every heat provider operates like this, some small ones (like the one affected) are a little more sloppy.
- pqtyw 9mo agoWell be the same definition Russia was at war with the US in Korea and Vietnam (or Afghanistan). To a much bigger extent to be fair since there were actual Russian pilotes deploying to both countries. I'm not sure whether Johnson or Nixon (during periods of sobriety of course) were considering directly attacking Russian territory because of that...
- rdtsc 9mo agoDoes Europe overall feel and act like that’s the case though? It seems as if the European war has been pushed to the background recently, and most people kind of forgot about it. If you walk down the streets of Paris or Berlin does it look like it’s wartime, do people talk about it much, do they share the latest front news and so on?
- joe_mamba 9mo ago>If you walk down the streets of Paris or Berlin does it look like it’s wartime, Like what exactly would you want them to do? Run around screaming all day because there's a war in another country 2000 km away from them? No, people just go on with their lives, doing their jobs, taking care of family and friends, paying their taxes, so that specialized workers in the ministry of defence can take care of the war stuff for them. That's how modern society works. It's even similar in Kiev, when you walk down the streets you see people living their lives. Gyms, bars, cafes, clubs are full and lively. People don't stop living and enjoying their daily lives just because there's shelling somewhere else in the country.
- koiueo 9mo agoKyiv. And "enjoying their daily lives" diminishes real tragedies of Ukrainians' daily lives.
- joe_mamba 9mo agoI beg to differ. Calling going out to a gym, cafe, club or a bar during wartime, as anything other than enjoying life, diminishes the real tragedy of those who are fighting on the front line and don't enjoy such leisure activities. Some people are fortunate enough that they can still get to enjoy life even if their country is in a war, as just like in every war ever, not everyone is affected equally.
- TheOtherHobbes 9mo agoI wasn't aware gym membership could bring 2,500 Ukrainian civilians back from the dead.
- redeeman 9mo agohave you seen the competence in those who manage the infrastructure? i'd say i would need significant proof before assuming anything. And IF russia is doing it, I would still say that we should put 99% blame on the absolute incompetents running the infrastructure, 1% russia.
- jacquesm 9mo agoIf you did then you'd be extremely gullible.
- OKRainbowKid 9mo agoThat seems like just victim blaming - "she was asking for it with the clothes she was wearing".
- RobotToaster 9mo agoSoftware with vulnerabilities was defectively written. If someone makes tanks with paper for armour, because it cuts costs, they are to blame if those tanks catch fire.
- nawgz 9mo agoA tank is designed for war. Infrastructure is designed to serve some other utility. Claiming it should also be hardened against (cyber) war is acknowledging that there is an aggressor performing an attack of war, not that the infrastructure is failing the utility it was designed for. It's fine to have this view that software should be defect free and hardened against sophisticated nation-state attackers, but it stretches the meaning of "defect" to me. A defect would be serving to fulfill that utility it had been designed for, not succumbing to malicious attackers.
- redeeman 9mo agookay, so you think just attaching PLCs to an rs485-to-ethernet adapter and connecting it straight unauthenticated to the internet, and then calling it a day is simply perfectly reasonable, since "well.. cant expect to harden against cyber warfare!! no defect!!!" ? because this is the kind of stuff infrastructure things do, along with MANY other things. Im sure not all infrastructure does it, but plenty do. This is not hardening, its BASIC security. any scriptkiddie from same country could find it and cause problems. How far would you say they should go to stop domestic script kiddies from messing with it? and if script kiddies from other countries mess with it, is it now cyber warfare?
- dopa42365 9mo agoThankfully we'll magically stop being at war with Russia once Ukraine gives up :P
- kstenerud 9mo agoHaha yep :P Next is Moldova. Then Latvia and Lithuania. Then Estonia and Northern Finland/Norway. Then Romania and Bulgaria. Putin has already said many times that he intends to rebuild the Russian empire to its zenith.
- wolvesechoes 9mo agoIt is not, because Europe is not a political entity. Russia is at war with some European countries.
- vaylian 9mo agoRussia considers all the European countries as lesser states that should be dominated. Even Hungary, which is politically friendly to Russia, is probably experiencing a lot of disinformation campaigns, because Russia wants to ensure that Putin's lapdog (i.e. Orban) stays in power and serves russian interests.
- vixen99 9mo agoIt would be helpful if we could avoid this kind of language that assumes (in this case) 'everyone knows that Orban is Russia's lapdog with an implication that if you don't know that then you're ... whatever. No, I'm not supporting Orban. I simply don't know enough in detail to comment. Perhaps you don't either. Better to describe what actually transpires (facts on the ground) and leave the generalization which inevitably depends in too many cases on one's private predilections. Popular public discussion in general is replete with this. Better to be aware that many of us have a tendency try to shoehorn factual observations into a handy emotive category which happens to appeal.
- vaylian 9mo agoIf you want facts, then start at this overview article on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_disinformation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_disinformation
- general1465 9mo agoPoland is a major logistical hub for everything going towards Ukraine. Thus targeting basic infrastructure like energy grid or railroad have to be expected. On the bright side, using these weapon grade malware is burning exploits and also showing current state and techniques of Russian cyberwarfare which defender can learn a lot from.
- WhyNotHugo 9mo ago> On the bright side, using these weapon grade malware is burning exploits and also showing current state and techniques of Russian cyberwarfare which defender can learn a lot from. Or perhaps they used an already-known malware to measure defensive capabilities without showing any of their cards.
- mrtesthah 9mo agoYou'd think it would've been done during the summer or some other time when that wouldn't matter then.
- throw_a_grenade 9mo agoNo, of course not. They want to also measure response in the physical aspects (like electricians thot would have to drive some time to arrive on site). They're testing end-to-end, so to say. There's no testing like testing in production.
- XorNot 9mo agoCyber-defensive measures aren't very useful though. Once malware is known to exist, you don't "reveal a capability" by detecting it - it all boils down to basically signature analysis, or just good standard practice (air gaps, software supply chain accountability etc). This is vastly different to real world military systems, where there are a lot more variables and no guarantees - i.e. countries have limited numbers of air defense systems and missiles, the missiles have finite non-zero flight times, the physics of detection systems and sensors are not absolute etc. The real world is just more complicated, so the value of buzzing someone's airspace reveals a lot more information then "huh, guess they didn't click on that email".
- IncreasePosts 9mo agoThe most obvious answer is Russia(or one of their allies like China or Iran) did it because Poland is supporting Ukraine in the war (directly, and also indirectly by letting stuff from other countries be staged and move through Poland).
- kstenerud 9mo agoThat would be the most obvious answer, but Russia wants to keep Poland off-balance over the next 2 decades so that they won't intervene as Russia captures its neighbors. You'll see a lot more sabotage in France if Europe agrees to a new nuclear defense pact.
- tokai 9mo agoRussia is currently focused at striking Ukrainian energy assets. Ukraine get energy imports from EU through Hungary and Poland. Hampering energy supply from Poland would but a huge strain on the already struggling Ukrainian network.
- badpun 9mo agoPoland is frequently listed by Putin and his crew as one of Russia’s greatest enemies.
- weezing 9mo agoNihil novi. It's like that for centuries. They are still salty about losing Moscow.
- theshrike79 9mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_generation_warfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_generation_warfare It's the Russian doctrine Keep the population of hostile countries uneasy at all times, destabilise a bit here and there, help them argue about stupid identity politics instead of focusing on things that actually matter. When people become complacent about Russians poking around here and there, breaking in and not doing anything etc - then when they actually need to act, the defence will be lukewarm.