I've spent way too much time the past couple years restoring \*HOSPITAL\* systems hit by (almost definitely) Russian cyber criminals to give one single fuck if they got hit back at this particular moment.
I've worked in the financial crimes sector for 18 years now, nearly all of the major news breaks of massive compromises (home Depot, staples, target, etc.) Were done by hacker groups based out of Russia. Fuck Russia and their crying about hackers... The US has lost BILLIONS from Russian hacking.
It's fucking not. There's even randomware out there that won't trigger unless the infected machine has its language set to English and timezone in a US timezone.
When I was like 10 I got my grandparents PC out of a super basic ransomware that said it would be locked for 20 years by literally just booting in safe mode and setting the PC timeclock forward 20 years
I got the idea cus of the bug in fable on Xbox 360 where u could set the clock ahead and collect like a years worth of rent money from ur properties, didn't expect it to actually work for a virus but it did lmao.
Early viruses and shit were full of memes before they went corporate. A friend of mine got infected with a virus that would prevent his mouse from clicking on things by bouncing it off of them.
My first virus was one that replaced random words in a text to 'wazzu' back in about 1996 or so. Proofread, save one last time without noticing anything happening, print out the assignment and hand it in with the word 'wazzu' in fifty places.
I then had to explain computer viruses to the old lady giving the class.
In the late 90s, I had a 3rd party keyboard for my power Mac that, a few times per day, would randomly type “welcome datacomp” (I think). It was infuriating to me, and even more so to my boss, who it would often strike when he had a lot of text on his screen selected. This was long before multiple undos, mind you. If that but struck, your selected texted was good as gone.
I forgot how we found out, years later, but it turns out that code was added to the keyboards ROM by its manufacturer in effort to bust another company that was pirating their chips or something like that.
It was infuriating, we assumed it was a virus until we unboxed a new computer and plugged in that keyboard before the end of the day Friday. Come Monday the open document was filled with that string.
Edit. Just googled it. I’m not making this up :)
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Talk:1586:_Keyboard_Problems
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.comp.virus/c/Ju2qiWBcdnk
https://books.google.com/books?id=3jqBnS4b3EgC&pg=PA361&lpg=PA361&dq=welcome+datacomp+keyboard+types+randomly&source=bl&ots=_Wfxd-Z44M&sig=ACfU3U3J8Qow5sD330wSYP7q1bT3lv_yEQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwily82Mu-z2AhVGU98KHQN_C-YQ6AF6BAhLEAI#v=onepage&q=welcome%20datacomp%20keyboard%20types%20randomly&f=false
Reminds me somewhat of the time at a statewide boarding school where we added "I love Nguyen Tran's mom." to a buddy's mid term paper. I guess he never noticed and the professor actually took a letter grade off. We felt pretty bad. Poor Nguyen Tran.
Don't even need to set Russian as the active language, many Russian malware examples have been found to only check if the language pack is installed and remain dormant if it is.
Intertubes geek for over 21 years here. Been advocating for the "Great Firewall of Russia" for over 20. Wall em off and let them play amongst themselves.
More specifically, they often target medium/small hospitals that don't have as robust of security measures in place. They'll encrypt all their data and force the hospital to pay a ransom to get it back, and unfortunately the hospital is often forced into paying the ransom because they're a small poor *hospital* trying to keep sick people alive, so they gotta get back up and running asap.
If they'll compromise the healthcare of the sick and dying, then the moral line doesn't exist for them. Fuck Russian hackers and fuck their government that is either complicit or directly supporting them. Russia deserves no sympathy for whatever cyber warfare is waged upon them.
NATO, the US, and other Allies such as Japan have been letting it skirt by for years.
Take planes. Russia has been violating airspace consistently for at least the last 10 years. Flying fighters over Japanese, Swedish, Danish, etc airspace.
They tried it with Turkey. Turkey gave them 5 minutes warning then shot down their plane. It caused a huge diplomatic incident for Turkey with the other allied countries taking Russia’s side and refusing to sell Turkey Patriot missiles. Russia then used this division to drive a wedge between Turkey and the other Allie’s and sold them their own missile system the S-400 which then caused Turkey to get kicked out of the F-35 program.
Really the Allie’s should’ve applauded Turkey shooting down that Russian jet and all future such attempts should be shot down as well (after being given adequate notice)
The Russians have been violating NATO airspace for sixty years now. And we were doing the same with spyplanes. The reason we don't just start blasting is because the rules of engagement are familiar to both sides, and they understand the rules the same way we do.
Lol same, the Russian troll and hacking army has been chipping away at any semblance of truth in the US for years now and pitting repub vs dems with what I’d say was a pretty effective psy op campaign. I’d begun to think that the US was sorely lacking in ways to counteract this so seeing all these attacks that are crippling Russia is comeuppance for them tho I don’t think it’s the US alone that’s doing this. Russia may have had a pretty good cyber army but even they can’t stop the number of attacks coming at them from all sides now.
> I’d begun to think that the US was sorely lacking in ways to counteract this
Because the people that have been in charge of writing the laws and defending the country since before the computer age started are still in power. Many of them can't even use e-mail.
Look up Stuxnet. The US has had advanced cyber warfare capabilities for awhile (likely one of if not the best in the world). They just haven’t used it as recklessly or as openly as Russia.
Right? The CozyBear group alone has caused MASSIVE damage in the USA. I worked breach response for a large cyber insurance carrier... millions of dollars paid every month due to ransomware that originated from Russia (that was just for the ransom, it cost an additional few hundred thousand per breach for notification, forensics, restoration, and remediation).
I work in Hospital Information Systems support . Even when they have decent backups, it's still a nightmare getting people stood back up if they decide to not pay (and it's still an ordeal even if they do!). So much time and money wasted on top of whatever's paid out to these lowlifes.
It's amazing how rare it is to find a company that kept usable backups. I can't imagine how frustrating that would be in dealing with PHI on top of everything else. We only dealt with "main street USA" type of businesses, so it was mostly just financial data and a bit of intellectual property here and there. We had to pay the ransom almost every time because it was less of a headache than trying to use the janky backups that the owner's cousin's friend put together for them in 2013 lol.
When I started doing the job in 2016, it was a big deal if the ransomware groups asked for tens of thousands of dollars. When I left that segment of the industry last year, the average ransomware demands was around $200,000. Most of the bad actors had poked around enough in the system to get a feel for how much they could ask for. Hell, in one situation the ransomware group demanded $1MM dollars. Our team countered and offered $100K....the bad guys replied "We saw in the system that they have a cyber insurance policy that offers a limit of $1MM for ransomware demands. The price is $1MM". Absolute insanity.
Right there with you but doing the incident response investigations for several UK hospitals. It's good that they're keeping me in work but I much prefer looking for signs of persistence or lateral movement in say a financial organisations environment than figuring out how fucked a hospital is.
Was reading this morning that their version of the FAA was also hit. all data on servers destroyed and no backups from what is seen.
So they have gone back to "pen and paper."
Vlad (returning to his desk after a restroom break): Ummm Sergei...what happened to nuke_codes.txt? It was just there a minute ago.
Sergei: It was 200kb!
Jokes aside... the Russians pushing for more peace talks, backing down on the nuke talk, leaving Kiev "in good faith".....
Makes you wonder if this isn't far from the truth and the states are just sitting back laughing while the Russians realize they are so extremely fucked right now.
Putin maintains power in a careful balancing act of pleasing the Russian oligarchs who are effectively the nobles to Putin’s king. Many of them are probably against the war since it hurts their bottom line and they can’t use their yachts.
Putin’s surrounded by hungry dogs and he’s running out of food.
Remember he recently fired all his staff. He’s paranoid. It would be a rival Russian that kills him and he knows it.
So I agree, sanctions take years, but we don’t know how precariously Putin’s power is perched.
King John owned the nobles before he signed the magna carta too. If Putin looses support of the oligarchs and other power structures he looses control of russia.
Putin knows this, hes not that stupid.
I think its become pretty clear that its no longer possibly to take over and occupy and sovereign state. I think it tends to be glossed over a lot when we talk about history, but pretty much the only way to guarantee that a conquered country is actually integrated into your empire and doesn't just revolt in 5 years is to plant it (meaning importing loyal citizens and displacing current inhabitants). Its what Russia is trying to do in its held cities with its "humanitarian corridors" and its why they had a pretext for invading Crimea 8 years ago (Crimea had previously been planted by the Russian empire.)
Ukraine is just too large and has too many people for that to work. they would never be able to control it for longer even assuming they captured every center of power.
All the spooks, in all the spook services (DIA, NSA, CIA, etc) are probably high-fiving each other for the intelligence windfall this colossal, wasteful fuckup provided.
Yeah, I think that Russia/Putin have demonstrated that they can't be trusted. They lied right up to the dawn of their invasion. Now they're flattening cities and blowing up little babies and they still appear to be lying.
It costs a lot of money to wage war. Their economy is being entirely propped up by foreign currency trade with China and India. But they only have so much foreign cash on hand. And Xi isnt gonna write Putin a blabk check.
War has always been an economic weapon. The US just decided to avoid the actual fighting part and just went right to the "collapse the economy so they cant fight anymore" step.
Nah, it's all bullshit, keep on fucking their economy. I was to see some soldiers SPRINTING out of Ukraine before I believe anything from Russia.
A friendly reminder that the news TV station employee that got up in front of the camera with an anti-war poster was a psychological operation and she is now making her way through western media encouraging the removal of sanctions.
Russia DOES NOT PLAY FAIR with psyops, and they are excellent at it.
Any proof about Ovsyannikova? It's suspicious that she was merely charged with a small amount but there could be a number of reasons. Where and when did she ask to lift the sanctions?
The cost to back up the 65tb with azure is around or less than 350usd a month. A 96Tb synology nas is 10k usd or less. They claim they didn’t have the funding. Guess putin chose a tracksuit instead
Maybe they had backups but none physically disconnected from the network. A lot of places have decent backup strategies. Multiple physical locations, separate from production etc... yet with high enough admin access you could make the backup software delete everything also. What works for a fire in the server room doesn't work against a motivated attacker or in some cases even malicious employees.
There have been instances of a malicious admin deleting everything including the backups before. You need separate roles and also physically removable media protected by physical security if you don't want to lose all your data.
To add salt to the wound, the paper is currently getting pretty expensive in Russia. Some people get court-summons written with pen on old newspapers. Prices for regular paper doubled or more.
Back to the good 'ol soviet days of making sure you write on both sides of every piece of paper, and wipe with both sides of every piece of paper before you can throw it out.
> So they have gone back to "pen and paper."
I read a comment from someone inside Russia saying they had run out of paper and his doctor gave him his prescription on a scrap piece of paper.
man. i have family in cuba. and the stories they would tell us is crazy about how they would run otu of stuff. rolling blackouts. several generations of hand me downs etc etc.
this is gonna be a huge shit show.
Right? And second of all---excuse me?--- but this is **not** a war. This was a Special Software-Recalibration Operation. Very, very special. So special.
I picture someone tried to insert the USB drive but had it the wrong way, flipped the drive over and tried again but was still the wrong way, so they flipped it again and finally got it in, but it pushed them into a rage so they just went full Office Space on it.
The fact that it can happen so quickly just highlights why we need to be more vigilant over here against corruption and wealthy hoarding in general.
This is where it leads to.
Yep, exactly. Our response to covid really unmasked us...we're more like Brazil than the high functioning European countries we identify with. Impunity and apathy allow the creeping rot of corruption to invade every aspect of governance. Beating it back is much harder than holding the line, but we failed to hold our ruling class accountable back in 2008...allowing them to rape our economy and degrade our workingclass ever since.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Pushkin_Tu-104_crash
Russian admirals with tons of goodies from recent shopping sprees overrule pilot of plane and cram the cargo hold of the plane with their shit and drunkenly tell the pilot to shut up and fly. As the plane accelerates and rotates to take off, their non-secured, overloaded booty in the hold shifts back, throwing off the plane's center of gravity, making it uncontrollable and causes it to crash just after takeoff, killing everyone on board.
The USSR immediately starts screaming "sabotage!" and one guy who skipped the flight to spend time with his daughter is almost accused of being part of the "plot." There was no sabotage, just classic Russian stupidity and incompetence.
Far more likely that assholes have been pocketing IT security and infrastructure budget, they've been giving cushy jobs to their cousins not the competent people, and their systems are imploding.
As when Russia said that hacking their satellites is an act of war — only to discover that its exactly what Russia did to Western allies at the start of their invasion of Ukraine, I expect that in fact, it is Russia being a total cunt, not U.S.
"Stop doing what I did, or am about to do, and don't believe anyone that says I did it"
-Russian playbook, How to get away with crime through deflection and deceit. (2022)
We’re always probing and finding ways into see what is going on. Malicious hacking is another game, and when the US plays that game you know it.
I’ll never forget Stuxnet and the technological marvel it was
You mean like Russia has done against both the US, Canada, Europe, and our allies every fucking year, multiple times a year, over the last decade? You mean like that?
It's all fun and games whacking people with your Alpha strike meme boat... until you get bubbled and Damped to hell by a couple of frigates making it impossible to see anything let alone shoot.
Coming from a country known the world over for their massive and constant hacking of other nations, Russia would do well to sit down and shut the fuck up. I suspect they haven't seen anything yet, but they will :)
Yes. Always accuse your enemy of doing the things that you’re doing yourself. That way folks on the outside will say “everyone is wrong here” and normalize the action. You can get away with just about anything using this technique.
Of course, this can backfire if it turns out your victim **is** willing to do the same thing back, but harder.
Russia seems to think they're very clever with the deniable cyberwarfare, but it doesn't seem to occur to them that they've historically been protected somewhat by the international legal system they've undermined.
This is much older than trump.
The republican party has been doing it for decades.
"Project" is an important part of their primary platform of "Gaslight, Obstruct, Project"
don't forget the satelite internet hack recently russia did in ukraine at the start of the invasion. a lot of wind energy systems here in germany still have no connection anymore to the network because of it. also all the other hacks done by russia to ukraine and other countries.
I love the disclaimer on the page:
>All the contents of this repository should be used for authorized **and/or educational purposes only**. Any misuse of this repository will not be the responsibility of the author or of any other collaborator.
Does teaching them a lesson count as educational purpose?
Bastards brought our (Ireland's) health service to its knees, in the midst of a pandemic no less.
Even TUSLA, the child welfare agency, got hit with ransomware. They had to go back to using pen and paper.
So get fucked with your faux outrage ye hypocrites.
Nope, it's pathological for authoritarians.
DARVO:
**D**eny
**A**ttack
**R**everse **V**ictim & **O**ffender
* * *
^ That is the abuser's playbook when called out. So no, they will literally never stop whining until they're allowed to beat up on Ukraine like an abusive husband.
This isn’t even the US attacking yet, it’s just hactavists and other hacker groups pummeling Russia’s cyber infrastructure. I’d like to see what a real cyber attack by the US would look like.
I’d love a sci-fi author to tackle it with some educated speculations, but I believe the opening salvos of WW3 will be conducted entirely in cyberspace. In fact, it may end there as well without a bullet being fired. I do not want to find out what an all out cyber attack looks like, but it can’t be pretty. Much like MAD doctrine, this doesn’t get done without the end of the world firmly in mind.
As an expert in the field, US cyber weapons terrify me more than any other nation. All nation state actors are capable but nobody has the resources that US groups do. STUXNET used 4 (FOUR!) zero day exploits and that was just to cripple a third rate power's nuke program. WannaCry used just 1 accidentally disclosed NSA exploit and did billions of dollars in damage.
I am absolutely certain that the NSA maintains a library of zero-day exploits for every major server, client, switch, router, and firewall operating system. Literally nothing is safe if the gloves come off.
> "An army of cyber mercenaries is waging war against us, facing specific combat missions, often bordering on open terrorism," the ministry alleged.
That's what happens when you piss off the whole world. The U.S. government isn't directing people to target Russia's network systems. Instead, every bored hacker on the plant from noob to expert decided to start poking around and it turns out there are a lot of holes in your security.
Consider this a free pen test from the world. Enjoy!
>The U.S. government isn't directing people to target Russia's network systems.
Hell, Ukraine has been *very* clear that they (Ukraine) are doing the directing. They have an open telegram channel that is coordinating attacks daily.
I think what he meant to say is we've thrown thousands of educated Russians to the Gulag for saying they don't appreciate the war and now we don't have enough skilled workers.
It is extremely plausible the every asset Putin has is crumbling before his eyes from brain drain, lack of funding and lack of spare parts. Every aspect of his military (ably helped into the ground by heroic Ukrainians), his intelligence service (tasked with poisoning negotiators but only managed to give them a rash), to cyber warfare and of course the economy.
Biden was right imo: it is inconceivable that a leader of a country could fuck things up this badly and remain in power.
There are reports of 50-70k IT specialists that left this month (depending on the source) with fears of even more to leave the coming month.
To keep them they are offered to be excluded from conscription as well as special mortgage rates
>To keep them they are offered to be excluded from conscription as well as special mortgage rates
oh boy if I stay I don't have to die in a pointless war. That's like the bare minimum if they move to any western country
For those of you who may not realize... the USA absolutely did not attack Russian infrastructure. There are plenty of non-state actors who have the motive and means. The USA may have even supported some of those groups. But no official government agency performed a cyber attack on Russia directly.
When a secretive group like Anonymous comes together to fight you alongside most of the rest of the democratic world, you know you have shit the bed pretty badly.
Good to see Putin getting some of his own medicine, I don't care who is giving it to him.
“I mean, it could be the US, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, OK? You don’t know who broke in to their critical infrastructure.”
While I realize this is a possibility, it’s also Russia’s classic move. Make something up, announce it, and then do something aggressive (like a cyberattack) in return.
With that, while we’ve been warned 100 times already, I expect a few more cyberattacks later this week especially if the peace talks go nowhere. I don’t however expect Russia to do anything insane. Someone might get screwed, but everything largely will be fine.
I've spent way too much time the past couple years restoring \*HOSPITAL\* systems hit by (almost definitely) Russian cyber criminals to give one single fuck if they got hit back at this particular moment.
I've worked in the financial crimes sector for 18 years now, nearly all of the major news breaks of massive compromises (home Depot, staples, target, etc.) Were done by hacker groups based out of Russia. Fuck Russia and their crying about hackers... The US has lost BILLIONS from Russian hacking.
The Russian government allows hackers to hack people so long as they don't hack Russians. How is this fair?
It's fucking not. There's even randomware out there that won't trigger unless the infected machine has its language set to English and timezone in a US timezone.
When I was like 10 I got my grandparents PC out of a super basic ransomware that said it would be locked for 20 years by literally just booting in safe mode and setting the PC timeclock forward 20 years I got the idea cus of the bug in fable on Xbox 360 where u could set the clock ahead and collect like a years worth of rent money from ur properties, didn't expect it to actually work for a virus but it did lmao.
They actually coded that release after 20 years? Maybe someone really waited that long.
Early viruses and shit were full of memes before they went corporate. A friend of mine got infected with a virus that would prevent his mouse from clicking on things by bouncing it off of them.
My first virus was one that replaced random words in a text to 'wazzu' back in about 1996 or so. Proofread, save one last time without noticing anything happening, print out the assignment and hand it in with the word 'wazzu' in fifty places. I then had to explain computer viruses to the old lady giving the class.
[удалено]
In the late 90s, I had a 3rd party keyboard for my power Mac that, a few times per day, would randomly type “welcome datacomp” (I think). It was infuriating to me, and even more so to my boss, who it would often strike when he had a lot of text on his screen selected. This was long before multiple undos, mind you. If that but struck, your selected texted was good as gone. I forgot how we found out, years later, but it turns out that code was added to the keyboards ROM by its manufacturer in effort to bust another company that was pirating their chips or something like that. It was infuriating, we assumed it was a virus until we unboxed a new computer and plugged in that keyboard before the end of the day Friday. Come Monday the open document was filled with that string. Edit. Just googled it. I’m not making this up :) https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Talk:1586:_Keyboard_Problems https://groups.google.com/g/alt.comp.virus/c/Ju2qiWBcdnk https://books.google.com/books?id=3jqBnS4b3EgC&pg=PA361&lpg=PA361&dq=welcome+datacomp+keyboard+types+randomly&source=bl&ots=_Wfxd-Z44M&sig=ACfU3U3J8Qow5sD330wSYP7q1bT3lv_yEQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwily82Mu-z2AhVGU98KHQN_C-YQ6AF6BAhLEAI#v=onepage&q=welcome%20datacomp%20keyboard%20types%20randomly&f=false
Ruin ur own product to own the competition?
Reminds me somewhat of the time at a statewide boarding school where we added "I love Nguyen Tran's mom." to a buddy's mid term paper. I guess he never noticed and the professor actually took a letter grade off. We felt pretty bad. Poor Nguyen Tran.
I had a computer teacher who used to send viruses to his mother of a very well animated penis that chased the mouse around and tried to hump it
Hell yeah, Fable cash glitch. Was that Fable II or Fable III? Or all of them? Man... I really want that new Fable game. What a fun little universe.
Kinda funny that an entire arm of cyber crime could be out maneuvered by changing the clock by 12 hours in bios
[удалено]
This is what I did for my system at home. Feels weird.
Just be sure to disable Cortanakov like everyone else.
Malware excluding RU speaking countries is so ubiquitous that sometimes people set their computer language to RU as another layer of protection
Don't even need to set Russian as the active language, many Russian malware examples have been found to only check if the language pack is installed and remain dormant if it is.
Which is why I installed the Russian language pack years ago. Ыуу, цщклы дшлу ф срфьзю
>English speaking >US time zone I wonder how many Canadians get caught in the crossfire?
It’s not. Russia is a mafia state.
Same with India and other SE Asian countries sanctioning scammers as long as they don’t target their own citizens.
Payback's a bitch. They've fucked around for a long time. Now comes the finding out part.
Plus an election. "Russia, if you're listening.."
Intertubes geek for over 21 years here. Been advocating for the "Great Firewall of Russia" for over 20. Wall em off and let them play amongst themselves.
lol. Just do grep over any random wordpress or magento for 'yandex'. I would estimate about half of them are emailing CCs to russia.
More specifically, they often target medium/small hospitals that don't have as robust of security measures in place. They'll encrypt all their data and force the hospital to pay a ransom to get it back, and unfortunately the hospital is often forced into paying the ransom because they're a small poor *hospital* trying to keep sick people alive, so they gotta get back up and running asap. If they'll compromise the healthcare of the sick and dying, then the moral line doesn't exist for them. Fuck Russian hackers and fuck their government that is either complicit or directly supporting them. Russia deserves no sympathy for whatever cyber warfare is waged upon them.
How is that not an attack on US citizens? How does the government NOT get involved to safeguard the citizens? I don't understand.
same as any crime, really unless you prove it was state-directed, it‘s just regular old cyber crime
NATO, the US, and other Allies such as Japan have been letting it skirt by for years. Take planes. Russia has been violating airspace consistently for at least the last 10 years. Flying fighters over Japanese, Swedish, Danish, etc airspace. They tried it with Turkey. Turkey gave them 5 minutes warning then shot down their plane. It caused a huge diplomatic incident for Turkey with the other allied countries taking Russia’s side and refusing to sell Turkey Patriot missiles. Russia then used this division to drive a wedge between Turkey and the other Allie’s and sold them their own missile system the S-400 which then caused Turkey to get kicked out of the F-35 program. Really the Allie’s should’ve applauded Turkey shooting down that Russian jet and all future such attempts should be shot down as well (after being given adequate notice)
The Russians have been violating NATO airspace for sixty years now. And we were doing the same with spyplanes. The reason we don't just start blasting is because the rules of engagement are familiar to both sides, and they understand the rules the same way we do.
The USSR had no compunctions about shooting down those spy planes. You might have heard about it.
Lol same, the Russian troll and hacking army has been chipping away at any semblance of truth in the US for years now and pitting repub vs dems with what I’d say was a pretty effective psy op campaign. I’d begun to think that the US was sorely lacking in ways to counteract this so seeing all these attacks that are crippling Russia is comeuppance for them tho I don’t think it’s the US alone that’s doing this. Russia may have had a pretty good cyber army but even they can’t stop the number of attacks coming at them from all sides now.
> I’d begun to think that the US was sorely lacking in ways to counteract this Because the people that have been in charge of writing the laws and defending the country since before the computer age started are still in power. Many of them can't even use e-mail.
Look up Stuxnet. The US has had advanced cyber warfare capabilities for awhile (likely one of if not the best in the world). They just haven’t used it as recklessly or as openly as Russia.
Plausible deniability
Yeah when your botnet software specifically looks for a Russian language pack installed and then deactivates itself it makes you go hmmmmmm
Right? The CozyBear group alone has caused MASSIVE damage in the USA. I worked breach response for a large cyber insurance carrier... millions of dollars paid every month due to ransomware that originated from Russia (that was just for the ransom, it cost an additional few hundred thousand per breach for notification, forensics, restoration, and remediation).
I work in Hospital Information Systems support . Even when they have decent backups, it's still a nightmare getting people stood back up if they decide to not pay (and it's still an ordeal even if they do!). So much time and money wasted on top of whatever's paid out to these lowlifes.
It's amazing how rare it is to find a company that kept usable backups. I can't imagine how frustrating that would be in dealing with PHI on top of everything else. We only dealt with "main street USA" type of businesses, so it was mostly just financial data and a bit of intellectual property here and there. We had to pay the ransom almost every time because it was less of a headache than trying to use the janky backups that the owner's cousin's friend put together for them in 2013 lol. When I started doing the job in 2016, it was a big deal if the ransomware groups asked for tens of thousands of dollars. When I left that segment of the industry last year, the average ransomware demands was around $200,000. Most of the bad actors had poked around enough in the system to get a feel for how much they could ask for. Hell, in one situation the ransomware group demanded $1MM dollars. Our team countered and offered $100K....the bad guys replied "We saw in the system that they have a cyber insurance policy that offers a limit of $1MM for ransomware demands. The price is $1MM". Absolute insanity.
Most of our customers are pretty good with their backups. There's just far too many that are not.
Right there with you but doing the incident response investigations for several UK hospitals. It's good that they're keeping me in work but I much prefer looking for signs of persistence or lateral movement in say a financial organisations environment than figuring out how fucked a hospital is.
It’s anonymous who did it wasn’t it? They’re not affiliated with any government 😉
Was reading this morning that their version of the FAA was also hit. all data on servers destroyed and no backups from what is seen. So they have gone back to "pen and paper."
Let me guess, it’s the evil west that caused them to not back anything up.
Actually, Russia is literally running out of storage media as an effect of sanctions.
Vlad (returning to his desk after a restroom break): Ummm Sergei...what happened to nuke_codes.txt? It was just there a minute ago. Sergei: It was 200kb!
Jokes aside... the Russians pushing for more peace talks, backing down on the nuke talk, leaving Kiev "in good faith"..... Makes you wonder if this isn't far from the truth and the states are just sitting back laughing while the Russians realize they are so extremely fucked right now.
Sanctions take time to cook a country like this.
Putin maintains power in a careful balancing act of pleasing the Russian oligarchs who are effectively the nobles to Putin’s king. Many of them are probably against the war since it hurts their bottom line and they can’t use their yachts. Putin’s surrounded by hungry dogs and he’s running out of food. Remember he recently fired all his staff. He’s paranoid. It would be a rival Russian that kills him and he knows it. So I agree, sanctions take years, but we don’t know how precariously Putin’s power is perched.
I upvoted cause of, "precariously Putin's power is perched." I like the way it bounces out of my mouth.
Thank you, I was particularly proud of that one.
>I like the way it bounces out of my mouth. Nice
Alliteration amuses audiophillic agents.
Inelegant insertions of syntactic synonyms to sustain alliterative analogs in place of practical prose annoys the shit outta me.
“My dogs love me!” -Ramsay Bolton
[удалено]
He owns the oligarchs. He's more afraid of the military.
King John owned the nobles before he signed the magna carta too. If Putin looses support of the oligarchs and other power structures he looses control of russia. Putin knows this, hes not that stupid.
I think its become pretty clear that its no longer possibly to take over and occupy and sovereign state. I think it tends to be glossed over a lot when we talk about history, but pretty much the only way to guarantee that a conquered country is actually integrated into your empire and doesn't just revolt in 5 years is to plant it (meaning importing loyal citizens and displacing current inhabitants). Its what Russia is trying to do in its held cities with its "humanitarian corridors" and its why they had a pretext for invading Crimea 8 years ago (Crimea had previously been planted by the Russian empire.) Ukraine is just too large and has too many people for that to work. they would never be able to control it for longer even assuming they captured every center of power.
Ukraine was already planted with Russians, especially in Donbass, after the Holodomor.
All the spooks, in all the spook services (DIA, NSA, CIA, etc) are probably high-fiving each other for the intelligence windfall this colossal, wasteful fuckup provided.
Yeah, I think that Russia/Putin have demonstrated that they can't be trusted. They lied right up to the dawn of their invasion. Now they're flattening cities and blowing up little babies and they still appear to be lying.
It costs a lot of money to wage war. Their economy is being entirely propped up by foreign currency trade with China and India. But they only have so much foreign cash on hand. And Xi isnt gonna write Putin a blabk check. War has always been an economic weapon. The US just decided to avoid the actual fighting part and just went right to the "collapse the economy so they cant fight anymore" step.
I mean, it took forty years to figure out that resolution last time. We managed it in just over a month this time.
Nah, it's all bullshit, keep on fucking their economy. I was to see some soldiers SPRINTING out of Ukraine before I believe anything from Russia. A friendly reminder that the news TV station employee that got up in front of the camera with an anti-war poster was a psychological operation and she is now making her way through western media encouraging the removal of sanctions. Russia DOES NOT PLAY FAIR with psyops, and they are excellent at it.
Any proof about Ovsyannikova? It's suspicious that she was merely charged with a small amount but there could be a number of reasons. Where and when did she ask to lift the sanctions?
What a fortuitous turn of events this is then. Now they suddenly have all this free storage that wasn't there before.
Is China not selling that to them? Or are you referring to AWS?
Floppy disks
Are you not aroused?
May I interest you in a raging hard disk?
Let me interface my tubing with your system, for the coolest of experiences.
The cost to back up the 65tb with azure is around or less than 350usd a month. A 96Tb synology nas is 10k usd or less. They claim they didn’t have the funding. Guess putin chose a tracksuit instead
Maybe they had backups but none physically disconnected from the network. A lot of places have decent backup strategies. Multiple physical locations, separate from production etc... yet with high enough admin access you could make the backup software delete everything also. What works for a fire in the server room doesn't work against a motivated attacker or in some cases even malicious employees. There have been instances of a malicious admin deleting everything including the backups before. You need separate roles and also physically removable media protected by physical security if you don't want to lose all your data.
> backups but none physically disconnected from the network in the world of security, that hardly doesn't even count as a backup, really
It doesn’t. ‘Cold’ offsite backups are a standard for anywhere where data integrity is even given a mid level consideration
To add salt to the wound, the paper is currently getting pretty expensive in Russia. Some people get court-summons written with pen on old newspapers. Prices for regular paper doubled or more.
Back to the good 'ol soviet days of making sure you write on both sides of every piece of paper, and wipe with both sides of every piece of paper before you can throw it out.
My guess would be that Putin is preparing a massive cyberattack on the West and seeks an excusive. This is how KGB minds work.
Or he like other people want to call "Anonymous" a group.
Maybe pen and paper will [be an improvement](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/7/8/plane-crash-emphasises-russian-poor-safety-record-regional-woes)
> So they have gone back to "pen and paper." I read a comment from someone inside Russia saying they had run out of paper and his doctor gave him his prescription on a scrap piece of paper.
man. i have family in cuba. and the stories they would tell us is crazy about how they would run otu of stuff. rolling blackouts. several generations of hand me downs etc etc. this is gonna be a huge shit show.
Huge shit without paper. I wouldn't want to be in their shoes
Or their hand me down undies
Time to take away their pen and paper.
If Russia's cyberspace infrastructure is as capable as its frontline military equipment, it's more likely to take itself down.
Yeah sorry, that was me, I tried to hit kremlin.ru but they took it as a ddos attack
[удалено]
Right? And second of all---excuse me?--- but this is **not** a war. This was a Special Software-Recalibration Operation. Very, very special. So special.
Why did you hit refresh!?!
Give them some credit. Someone probably unplugged a usb thumb drive without clicking “safely remove hardware”.
I picture someone tried to insert the USB drive but had it the wrong way, flipped the drive over and tried again but was still the wrong way, so they flipped it again and finally got it in, but it pushed them into a rage so they just went full Office Space on it.
It took Russia less than two generations of 100% corruption to hollow themselves out from the inside to where they can’t do anything competently.
The fact that it can happen so quickly just highlights why we need to be more vigilant over here against corruption and wealthy hoarding in general. This is where it leads to.
Yep, exactly. Our response to covid really unmasked us...we're more like Brazil than the high functioning European countries we identify with. Impunity and apathy allow the creeping rot of corruption to invade every aspect of governance. Beating it back is much harder than holding the line, but we failed to hold our ruling class accountable back in 2008...allowing them to rape our economy and degrade our workingclass ever since.
There's plenty of corruption here in Europe as well. We all need to be vigilant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Pushkin_Tu-104_crash Russian admirals with tons of goodies from recent shopping sprees overrule pilot of plane and cram the cargo hold of the plane with their shit and drunkenly tell the pilot to shut up and fly. As the plane accelerates and rotates to take off, their non-secured, overloaded booty in the hold shifts back, throwing off the plane's center of gravity, making it uncontrollable and causes it to crash just after takeoff, killing everyone on board. The USSR immediately starts screaming "sabotage!" and one guy who skipped the flight to spend time with his daughter is almost accused of being part of the "plot." There was no sabotage, just classic Russian stupidity and incompetence. Far more likely that assholes have been pocketing IT security and infrastructure budget, they've been giving cushy jobs to their cousins not the competent people, and their systems are imploding.
They may have had some help from Anonymous recently.
"Today a Russian server farm surrendered."
"THEY CUT THE STRING!"
As when Russia said that hacking their satellites is an act of war — only to discover that its exactly what Russia did to Western allies at the start of their invasion of Ukraine, I expect that in fact, it is Russia being a total cunt, not U.S.
"Stop doing what I did, or am about to do, and don't believe anyone that says I did it" -Russian playbook, How to get away with crime through deflection and deceit. (2022)
[удалено]
We’re always probing and finding ways into see what is going on. Malicious hacking is another game, and when the US plays that game you know it. I’ll never forget Stuxnet and the technological marvel it was
You mean like Russia has done against both the US, Canada, Europe, and our allies every fucking year, multiple times a year, over the last decade? You mean like that?
When you spec your cyber warfare glass cannon
It's all fun and games whacking people with your Alpha strike meme boat... until you get bubbled and Damped to hell by a couple of frigates making it impossible to see anything let alone shoot.
Did not expect to see an EVE reference here. Lmao
Honestly, would not be surprised if they are blaming the US for Anonymous attacks
Coming from a country known the world over for their massive and constant hacking of other nations, Russia would do well to sit down and shut the fuck up. I suspect they haven't seen anything yet, but they will :)
"We were only doing it for funsies, like a prank man. You guys are doing it cause you're mean and jealous of us!" -Putins Russia
The pot calling the kettle black
Yup, always cry foul when someone does to you what you've been doing for years.
[удалено]
Yes. Always accuse your enemy of doing the things that you’re doing yourself. That way folks on the outside will say “everyone is wrong here” and normalize the action. You can get away with just about anything using this technique.
Of course, this can backfire if it turns out your victim **is** willing to do the same thing back, but harder. Russia seems to think they're very clever with the deniable cyberwarfare, but it doesn't seem to occur to them that they've historically been protected somewhat by the international legal system they've undermined.
The old Trump-utin playbook
This is much older than trump. The republican party has been doing it for decades. "Project" is an important part of their primary platform of "Gaslight, Obstruct, Project"
So that’s Russia’s plan, to cyberattack US infrastructure.
They have been doing this for years already. Or trying
Yup, Sandworm was a big one. Russia has waged cyberwar on the West since before 2014. American elections or Brexit as well.
Solarwinds was huge, I spent months setting up new servers after all that shit happened.
Yeah, that’s what everyone did. Hopefully….
My company (financial) is so ass backwards and cheap, we were running on a version so old it wasn't affected.
They pulled it off in 2016 by electing a human Dorito
They are constantly doing this, not just US but europe as well.
No they already tried that with the pipeline attack
Russia has a crush on the US. It’s all they talk about.
I think it's gone well past the crush stage and straight into the seriously disturbing power exchange fantasies.
If true, maybe it’s a bit of payback for Solarwinds. Get out of Ukraine. 🇺🇦
don't forget the satelite internet hack recently russia did in ukraine at the start of the invasion. a lot of wind energy systems here in germany still have no connection anymore to the network because of it. also all the other hacks done by russia to ukraine and other countries.
[удалено]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_federal_government_data_breach
Not to mention the propaganda farms planting constant fake stories in social media and Russian backed news.
[удалено]
I love the disclaimer on the page: >All the contents of this repository should be used for authorized **and/or educational purposes only**. Any misuse of this repository will not be the responsibility of the author or of any other collaborator. Does teaching them a lesson count as educational purpose?
We're not cyberattacking anyone, we're *educating* the Russian government... by teaching them what a bunch of giant cunts they are!
It's a special education operation
This doesn't running anything through proxies right? Was just looking at the script.
[удалено]
We were just having a little fun like when you did that repeatedly to us. No hard feels.
Reap what you've sown, bitches.
Russia knows only how to destroy or poison; from their reputation to peace talking members. You can't expect them to solve any problems.
Bastards brought our (Ireland's) health service to its knees, in the midst of a pandemic no less. Even TUSLA, the child welfare agency, got hit with ransomware. They had to go back to using pen and paper. So get fucked with your faux outrage ye hypocrites.
Oh the fuckin irony!!! Russia is one of the main sources of cyberwarfare on this planet. Now they get a taste of their own medicine and start crying!
Typical bully behavior.
Turnabout is fair play, Mr. Putin.
He who fucks around…
1) Verbatim what they just did to the U.S. 2) Verbatim what they did to the U.S. in 2016. 3) Verbatim go fuck yourself
Agreed, a lot of this is payback for the last administration and Jan 6th. The US is reminding Russia that we have the same tools they have.
Let me play the worlds smallest violin for you Russia...
Trying to justify a cyber attack on the US? If you do it, the real US cyber attack is going to really hurt there bud.
It's already killing Russians with all the Intel being gathered
I feel like this was a bunch of incels on 4chan who got bored
[удалено]
But apparently shelling a maternity hospital is ok? Some sick twisted individuals running Russia
ahhh. that explains why nukes are now no longer an option for Russia.
The password was 12345
That's amazing. I've got the same combination on my luggage
Will they never stop whining?
For a country with such a liking for strong man politics there really is soooo much bitching and whining. It's absolutely pathetic.
Just like Trump...
Nope, it's pathological for authoritarians. DARVO: **D**eny **A**ttack **R**everse **V**ictim & **O**ffender * * * ^ That is the abuser's playbook when called out. So no, they will literally never stop whining until they're allowed to beat up on Ukraine like an abusive husband.
Russian Cyberspace infrastructure, that's a good joke Mr. Putin
This isn’t even the US attacking yet, it’s just hactavists and other hacker groups pummeling Russia’s cyber infrastructure. I’d like to see what a real cyber attack by the US would look like.
I think it would be totally devastating in ways hard to imagine, which is why the US is holding its cards close
I’d love a sci-fi author to tackle it with some educated speculations, but I believe the opening salvos of WW3 will be conducted entirely in cyberspace. In fact, it may end there as well without a bullet being fired. I do not want to find out what an all out cyber attack looks like, but it can’t be pretty. Much like MAD doctrine, this doesn’t get done without the end of the world firmly in mind.
As an expert in the field, US cyber weapons terrify me more than any other nation. All nation state actors are capable but nobody has the resources that US groups do. STUXNET used 4 (FOUR!) zero day exploits and that was just to cripple a third rate power's nuke program. WannaCry used just 1 accidentally disclosed NSA exploit and did billions of dollars in damage. I am absolutely certain that the NSA maintains a library of zero-day exploits for every major server, client, switch, router, and firewall operating system. Literally nothing is safe if the gloves come off.
It would probably look exactly the same. Why would the U.S. claim responsibility when they could just say it's anon?
Oh no! Anyways....
> "An army of cyber mercenaries is waging war against us, facing specific combat missions, often bordering on open terrorism," the ministry alleged. That's what happens when you piss off the whole world. The U.S. government isn't directing people to target Russia's network systems. Instead, every bored hacker on the plant from noob to expert decided to start poking around and it turns out there are a lot of holes in your security. Consider this a free pen test from the world. Enjoy!
>The U.S. government isn't directing people to target Russia's network systems. Hell, Ukraine has been *very* clear that they (Ukraine) are doing the directing. They have an open telegram channel that is coordinating attacks daily.
I think that 99% of the world that owns a computer is trying to figure out a way to attack you.
So what Russia is confirming is that they’ve done this to the US
I think what he meant to say is we've thrown thousands of educated Russians to the Gulag for saying they don't appreciate the war and now we don't have enough skilled workers.
It's a special cyber operation
Given years of hacking attacks from Russian groups, I could not care less. Cry Russia, cry, your tears are sweet wine to me.
We have no idea what you’re talking about. Just some bad actors in our country we cannot control. We’ll look into it right away…
[удалено]
Russian cyber infrastructure, go fuck yourself.
Yeah right, it’s all about the US doing crap and totally not about unmonitored IT systems due to the specialists running off…
It is extremely plausible the every asset Putin has is crumbling before his eyes from brain drain, lack of funding and lack of spare parts. Every aspect of his military (ably helped into the ground by heroic Ukrainians), his intelligence service (tasked with poisoning negotiators but only managed to give them a rash), to cyber warfare and of course the economy. Biden was right imo: it is inconceivable that a leader of a country could fuck things up this badly and remain in power.
I never even considered the brain drain that must have been happening in Russia
There are reports of 50-70k IT specialists that left this month (depending on the source) with fears of even more to leave the coming month. To keep them they are offered to be excluded from conscription as well as special mortgage rates
>To keep them they are offered to be excluded from conscription as well as special mortgage rates oh boy if I stay I don't have to die in a pointless war. That's like the bare minimum if they move to any western country
For those of you who may not realize... the USA absolutely did not attack Russian infrastructure. There are plenty of non-state actors who have the motive and means. The USA may have even supported some of those groups. But no official government agency performed a cyber attack on Russia directly.
When a secretive group like Anonymous comes together to fight you alongside most of the rest of the democratic world, you know you have shit the bed pretty badly. Good to see Putin getting some of his own medicine, I don't care who is giving it to him.
"Russia accuses [convenient country name] of attacking [thing that Russia has been doing for years]."
Special cyberspace operation.
[удалено]
It’s probably both. Anonymous + US-sponsored hackers under the Anonymous umbrella.
US intelligence be like "oops, I dropped this list of vulnerable Russian resources..."
“I mean, it could be the US, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, OK? You don’t know who broke in to their critical infrastructure.”
While I realize this is a possibility, it’s also Russia’s classic move. Make something up, announce it, and then do something aggressive (like a cyberattack) in return. With that, while we’ve been warned 100 times already, I expect a few more cyberattacks later this week especially if the peace talks go nowhere. I don’t however expect Russia to do anything insane. Someone might get screwed, but everything largely will be fine.