[ad_1]
The book’s subtitle proclaims “a new era of cyber warfare and the hunt for the Kremlin’s most dangerous programmers.”
That’s right, in recent years, after more impressive cyber attacks, there has been no shortage of deliberation on what is happening here. His fingers point to both Iranian professionals and North Koreans.
But in a detailed and adventurous narrative, A. Greenberg constantly comes to the conclusion that behind the many operations are Russian programmers working for military intelligence, who are circling but still not leaving their mark.
„Twitter“ nuotr./A.Greenbergo knyga „Sandworm“
Like a ghost
Ukraine, which lost the Crimea annexed to Russia in 2014 and had to defend itself against Russia’s crackdown on the Donbass, counted aggressive cyberattacks in early 2015. Later, experts discovered that all were commissioned by the Kremlin.
The attack was ruthless. He targeted both the government, the media and the transport network servers, and Ukrainian experts watched helplessly as various systems collapsed around him.
Scanpix / AP photo / Numerous cyber operations in Ukraine after the annexation of Crimea and the start of the war in Donbass
One day it was not possible to find train schedules, the next, to use ATMs. The most severe blow was the paralysis of the electricity grid: hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians had to live in darkness and without basic comforts for some time.
“It just came to our attention then. After the attacks, the Ukrainians told me the feeling that the ghosts of the Internet had entered our homes,” intrigues A. Greenberg at the beginning of the book.
In a smart book, the journalist focuses not only on the activities of Russian programmers; Let’s say the entire chapter is dedicated to the Stuxnet worm, created in the United States, which in June 2010 physically destroyed the uranium enrichment facilities at Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Scanpix / AP photo / Stuxnet physically destroyed uranium enrichment facilities at Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2010
But Greenberg quoted The Washington Post as saying in 2017 that Russian programmers had developed a cyber weapon that could turn out to be the most damaging in history: one that could disrupt power grids and cause total chaos in everyday life.
The author of the book is horrified to write about how civilians would suffer during future wars in cyberspace.
Greenberg also says the West pays too little attention to the threat, unlike Russia and specifically the country’s GRU military intelligence service.
He has published a reference to a popular book.
Scholars certainly know Frank Herbert’s book “Dune” and the fact that the planet Arakis, invented by the writer, is home to a giant desert worm: “Sandworm.”
It turns out that the GRU programmers, whose traces were barely traced by Western cybersecurity specialists (especially the great merits of CrowdStrike, which found that the GRU program company Fancy Bear raged during the 2016 US presidential election), also loved to Dune.
When cybersecurity specialist Drew Robinson unmasked the Russian-developed BlackEnergy data extraction program, he discovered a kind of signature in this information: the “arrakis02” file.
“Twitter” nuotr./Andy Greenbergas
Robinson, as Greenberg writes, said that he immediately felt he had to try looking for that fingerprint at other crime scenes as well. And they found that experts soon realized that they could link the already cold crime of programmers around the world to the GRU and the group of this service, which Westerners called “Sandworm.”
Cyberspaces have been transformed into devious Puar and Sherlock Holms, sitting in dark rooms and tirelessly creating new programs that help detect traces of programmers.
Clearly, it took several years to confirm that the GRU specialists had exploited the security vulnerabilities. The Russians fought as they knew, leaving “evidence” that other countries were supposedly acting.
Probably the main merit of A. Greenberg is that he translated this process of finding and determining guilt into human language. The content of the book is easy to understand even for a reader who is not comfortable in the world of computers; on the contrary, you feel like a good detective in the morning.
Puaro fixed and sherlock holmes It has morphed into cyber-shoals that sit in dark rooms and create ever-new programs that help detect hacker traces.
Time to close the gaps
The GRU programmers were not only involved in espionage, concludes A. Greenberg, the objectives were more ambitious: “It is not necessary to break into industrial control systems when collecting intelligence. “Sandworm dug deeper and tested whether it could cause physical damage through cyber operations.”
The NotPetya virus created in Russia is still considered the most dangerous in the world.
The worm was intended to attack Ukraine alone, but the infection quickly spread around the world: thousands of computers were locked down and required to pay for the virus.
Scanpix / ITAR-TASS photo / NotPetya attacked the computer
In the world of cybercriminals, these maneuvers have, in fact, been used for a long time. But in the case of NotPetya, the ransom didn’t work – the data was still destroyed. A. Greenberg aptly writes about “automatic, rapid and unscrupulous forest fires.”
The author of the book does not mention the attacks on Estonia in 2007 as a starting point for much more aggressive activities by Russian programmers than before, but rather the short Russian war with Sacartwell in the summer of 2008, which the Kremlin ordered the GRU to extend.
According to Greenberg, Moscow was so infuriated by GRU’s failures at Sakartvele that there were even threats to cancel service in the Kremlin corridors. GRU responded by founding Sandworm.
Scanpix / AP photo / GRU headquarters in Moscow
Moving on to these days, the US, while the country has significantly strengthened its Cyber Operations Headquarters in recent years, should pay close attention to what Russia and the GRU have planned for the 2020 presidential election.
Experts have no doubt that Americans have already learned the lessons, both from the GRU’s operations in 2016 at home, when the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton were hit hard, and from Russian dogs in Ukraine.
However, the problem, according to A. Greenberg, may be that the American cybersecurity strategist orders Donald Trump to train more than to defend himself against attacks, but to prepare them themselves.
The best defense: attack? Maybe, but when we talk about two nuclear states, the risk is enormous.
[ad_2]
