Tag Archive for: cyberwar

Ukraine’s cyber chief says Kyiv is winning ‘world’s first cyberwar’

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For Ukraine’s main cybersecurity agency, Russia’s full-scale war began over a month before Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine from all directions – with a large cyber attack on Jan. 14, 2022.

“It all started with an attack on state authorities, it was the largest attack in 17 years,” says Yurii Shchyhol, head of the State Special Communications Service, which is responsible for defending Ukraine’s cyberspace.

Shchyhol says over 90 government websites were targeted, about 20 of them were defaced, and some data was erased. It took Ukrainian authorities 2-3 days to get those websites back up.

“This was the first indication for us that (Russia) was planning something big,” he adds.

The month leading up to the full-scale invasion, Ukraine experienced several major cyberattacks – on Feb. 15 and Feb. 22.

By the time Russia launched its full-scale war, Ukraine was ready to face Kremlin’s cyberwarfare, taking place alongside the ground offensive.

The 7,500 employees of the Special Communications Service are now in charge of protecting Ukraine from cyberattacks, ensuring the military and political communication is secure, and conducting online operations to hamper Russia’s war effort.

Read also: Fighting smarter: Ukraine’s transformation into a military innovator

The agency has also created a database of critical infrastructure, and coordinates its defense.

“There has never been such a war in history,” Shchyhol, who took charge of the agency in 2021, says. “It is the world’s first cyberwar in general, and there is no country in the world (except Ukraine) with this experience.”

He adds that Ukraine has faced around 20 cyberattacks per day since February 2022, with most of them deterred automatically, while some requiring timely intrusions by the agency.

In the 16 months since the start of the full–scale war, Shchyhol says Ukraine hasn’t lost any critical information, nor were any major systems downed.

Shchyhol says the agency is now drawing up a list of sanctions and laws required to stop Russia from being able to conduct cyberwarfare.

“Even after our victory on the ground, we understand that the cyberwar will not cease, and they will persist in attacking our systems,”…

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‘Vulkan’ Leak Offers a Peek at Russia’s Cyberwar Playbook

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Did you hear that Donald Trump got indicted this week? Of course you did. Ridiculous question. The first-ever indictment of a former US president had been looming for weeks. And now that it’s happened, the move by a Manhattan grand jury is deepening fissures in America’s already-fraught political divide. But while Trump headlines flood your feeds, there were plenty of other big stories this week, none of which have anything to do with any of that. 

In Germany, police are cracking down on people who post adult content to websites and platforms that lack age-verification checks, like Twitter. This has resulted in fines and threats of jail time, while some performers are deleting their accounts—or fleeing the country. This is just one of the impacts of a wave of age-verification laws sweeping the global internet.

Meanwhile, in darker corners of the internet, North Korea–backed hackers are using a rare technique to launder their stolen cryptocurrencies: paying to mine clean crypto with loot taken from their victims. The tactic is meant to throw blockchain detectives off the trail of swiped funds. Speaking of ill-gotten gains, Costa Rica is still reeling from a series of ransomware attacks last spring that left swaths of the country’s infrastructure devastated. As a result, the US government is sending $25 million in aid to help it recover. 

Most victims of cyberattacks don’t get help from the US government, however. Fortunately for them, this week Microsoft announced its new system, Security Copilot, which integrates OpenAI’s ChatGPT and home-grown artificial intelligence to help incident responders managed breaches. Of course, the best way to protect yourself from getting hacked is to make sure all your systems are fully patched and up to date.

To top it all off, this week we revealed new documents obtained through a public records request which show that Good Smile, a major toy company that creates figurines for companies like Disney, invested $2.4 million in the toxic imageboard 4chan, helping to keep the company online.

But that’s not all. Each week, we dive into the stories we weren’t able to report on ourselves. Click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe…

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Live Cyber Attacks – DIGITPOL Cyber Crime Investigation

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India is dangerously unprepared for Chinese cyber-war. AIIMS ransomware attack shows why

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Eight hundred acres of living theatre had been lovingly produced to allow the emperor to traverse his kingdom and the world without leaving home: The Garden of Eternal Brightness contained the temples of Tibet and Mongolia, the garden of Hangzhou, and a street scene with actors playing shopkeepers, entertainers and even beggars. The Western gardens, designed by Jesuit missionaries, included faux-baroque palaces and monuments modelled on the greatest European architecture.

Then, in 1860, French and British armies marched into Beijing, pillaging the Garden of Eternal Brightness and stealing royal treasures, including a Pekinese dog they nicknamed “Looty.” Around 10 years ago, in 2013, when Chinese President Xi Jinping came to power, he took top colleagues on a museum tour recording those events—and claimed the Communist Party alone could guard China’s independence.

Late in the summer of 2018, Ding Xiaoyang stood in the headquarters of the Ministry of State Security—located on the western end of the ruins of the Garden of Eternal Brightness—to receive a medal honouring the intelligence officer’s contributions. Through a front company called Hainan Technology, United States prosecutors have alleged, Ding identified and recruited “talented computer hackers to penetrate foreign entities and steal trade secrets, proprietary research and data.”

The Ministry of State Security—China’s principal intelligence service—targeted cutting-edge research on biotechnology, robotics and applied physics at universities and even industrial conglomerates. The campaign was part of a secret war authorised by Xi to secure the “great national revival” he promised.

Also read: Narco test for Aftab Poonawalla won’t help. It’s bad-faith science masking lazy police work

The world of ‘Wicked Rose’

For more than two weeks now, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) has been struggling to restore data lost in a ransomware attack. The data was said to have been obliterated by malware developed inside Chinese intelligence-controlled hacking networks. Experts are uncertain about the identity and motives of the attackers—which could range from ransom…

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