Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ukraine calls on hacker underground to defend against Russia

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 636 posts

Re: Ukraine calls on hacker underground to defend against Russia

#91

Post by wolverine876 »

whatshisface wrote: post #71
wolverine876 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> support Ukrainian army as private persons, without government/state. How do you hope to defeat Russia without coordinating with the lawful and most powerful institutions in the country? Note also that probably all foreign government assistance, especially the motherlodes of assistance from NATO states, including cyber, will be going through the Ukranian government. > You could just donate, or you could create some…

> All your points seem to reduce support for and divert it from the Ukranian government and their military. Isn't that absurdly dangerous in this moment? Almost none of the people on HN have anything to contribute to the Ukranian military. At the same time, all of the things related to actually living as a person in any country, at war or peace time, revolve around jobs, the economy and technology, things people on H…

> Almost none of the people on HN have anything to contribute to the Ukranian military.

Many people here could participate in their cyber efforts, and/or know others who could. I would think HN would be an especially fruitful recruiting ground.

Also, public support worldwide is essential, as is evidenced by both sides' intense investment in it.

Re: Ukraine calls on hacker underground to defend against Russia

#92

Post by charles_f »

dschulz wrote: post #75

Probably I'm just naive but I really don't understand this cyber warfare theater. Why aren't all internet operators in the free world just blackholing all russian ASNs (complete with the other allied bullies) from the internet routing tables? Wouldn't this be enough to avert all the nasty attacks on critical infrastructure?

That would cut off the libgen though, so I'm against that.

Re: Ukraine calls on hacker underground to defend against Russia

#93

Post by ppaagi »

cfcf14 wrote: post #67

It's not clear what we can actually do to help. I work as a web-sec machine learning researcher, and I'd like to help. But anything I can do is probably illegal in my country or a breach of contract with my employer :(

I find it interesting how often the reason "but that's illegal" comes up since I've moved to Germany. In France : sure, we generally keep to the law because that is the point, but when a situation calls for crossing a red light because it's 1am, you're on foot, there's no one on the road in sight or hearing distance, and your last train is about to leave, you bet virtually everyone would make that judgment call and cross the street independently (in germany it would really depend on the person from my impression).

It's tricky, though, talking about illegal things online. I feel like the internet was more free ten years ago. If anything was illegal then you put a "for educational purposes" disclaimer on it but the information was available or hypotheticals could be discussed fairly freely. People can think for themselves if they want to put anything into action, and might decide more based on morals than, say, their employer's contract. Indeed one does not hack russia, inform their employer in writing, and advertise their name in the tcp handshake in case they want to send them vodka.

How would you act if it was your country being attacked, would you still think "but that's illegal" ? Not saying that, thus, you must now do something illegal. I don't want to push you in either direction. But if you want to do this by your own morals (not anyone else morals) then, well, that's the thing the submission is calling for, not for consulting with your employer because their legal department is going to tell you to not do anything ever.

Re: Ukraine calls on hacker underground to defend against Russia

#94

Post by bink »

This thread is mostly full of jokes, and that's cool. But more seriously I'm exactly the kind of person I suppose this is meant to appeal to. I've spent the last 2-3 decades breaking into systems. Many of these systems comprise what the US calls "critical infrastructure". That's pipelines, power generation, transmission, distribution. Air traffic control systems. Government agencies.

I'm based in the US. The problem is that the US, unlike Russia, will not simply agree to allow attacks against foreign targets so long as its suits their strategic purposes. And I suppose that's for the best. In the meantime, myself and people like me simply aren't going to risk our entire careers to retaliate. I suppose if we felt strongly enough we would've joined the NSA and done this legally. I wish Ukraine the best and hope our "official" hackers are doing their best to assist or will be unleashed soon.

Re: Ukraine calls on hacker underground to defend against Russia

#95

Post by merlincorey »

freedomben wrote: post #49
TameAntelope wrote: post #37

Am I the only one who thinks this is well intentioned but kind of silly? I don’t know a lot about this space, but I don’t know especially how many skills translate from offense to defense. Is this basically just a call for folks to turn in their 0days and access or something? Seems wt least marginally more useful than trying to train up a bunch of script kiddies to fight GRU…

They're not requesting script kiddies, and they're not asking for a bunch of vigilantes. They want applications: > "Ukrainian cybercommunity! It's time to get involved in the cyber defense of our country," the post read, asking hackers and cybersecurity experts to submit an application via Google docs, listing their specialties, such as malware development, and professional references. You'd be amazed at how well off…

> asking hackers and cybersecurity experts to submit an application via Google docs, listing their specialties, such as malware development, and professional references.

So it's effectively a free honey pot for Russia to get information on Ukranian cyber security professionals and a free pass to infiltrate them?

Re: Ukraine calls on hacker underground to defend against Russia

#97

Post by slim »

awb wrote: post #4

Anonymous is supposedly joining the cyber war: https://twitter.com/YourAnonNews/status/1496954233492541444 https://twitter.com/YourAnonOne/status/1496965766435926039 They are claiming responsibility for taking down RT.com and some other Russian sites.

  While this account cannot claim to speak for the whole of the Anonymous collective
Anonymous would never say that :)

Re: Ukraine calls on hacker underground to defend against Russia

#98

Post by loves_mangoes »

btheshoe wrote: post #44
awb wrote: post #4

Anonymous is supposedly joining the cyber war: https://twitter.com/YourAnonNews/status/1496954233492541444 https://twitter.com/YourAnonOne/status/1496965766435926039 They are claiming responsibility for taking down RT.com and some other Russian sites.

isn't anonymous just a loose affiliation of people on 4chan though? Kind of strange to claim that the whole collective is doing something.

That's where it started, but they're entirely separate banners now.

It is actually not allowed to organize raids or other Anonymous-style hacktivities that are against US law on 4chan. So, calling for cyber war may just net you a warning from moderators. The board is not the bastion of absolute unregulated free speech people think it is!

More broadly, outside of the current geopolitical context, trying to pick a target and rally anons against it is in bad taste. If you try, you may be told that "4chan is Not Your Personal Army" (NYPA).

As a result, the various "Anonymous" groups really don't have a home there.

Re: Ukraine calls on hacker underground to defend against Russia

#99

Post by lucb1e »

mhh__ wrote: post #85
lucb1e wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd have to cut literally every cable and satellite connection and radio transmission in and out of the country. With something as geographically distributed as Russia, that sounds very hard to convince every country to convince every operator to... and even then, there's some wireless options.

Presumably there's a Pareto 20% (or smaller I'd imagine) of connections that carry 80% of the traffic? At very least the increased latency of being forced onto suboptimal paths would be a statement

Sure, but whose traffic is truly going to be disrupted? There's a reason they had this stuff about being less dependent in the past, I seem to remember they disconnected DNS traffic to the outside for a day as a test a few years ago. This 80% will impact the netflix/youtube streams, video takes a lot of bandwidth (megabits per second) compared to push-to-talk audio (kilobits per second) or plain text (~21 bytes per second is the average american reading speed). Sure there will be overhead and webpages are crazy nowadays so you need more than 21B/s, but e.g. email can work very easily on 20% of the typical bandwidth (probably also 2%, but it depends on the specifics, e.g. QoS would help a lot there).

And even if you reduced it to a few megabits snuck in and out for the whole country, the military would use that and what's impacted is civilians. Bad for the economy? Meh, if all countries were already convinced to be against russia, then trade would be at a standstill and no comms for civilians would not matter that much financially.

That's not to say it's not worth a try, but I expect it won't be effective, or if it is, I'm skeptical that it would hinder them much more than any traditional trade limits already could.

Re: Ukraine calls on hacker underground to defend against Russia

#100

Post by stickfigure »

bink wrote: post #94

This thread is mostly full of jokes, and that's cool. But more seriously I'm exactly the kind of person I suppose this is meant to appeal to. I've spent the last 2-3 decades breaking into systems. Many of these systems comprise what the US calls "critical infrastructure". That's pipelines, power generation, transmission, distribution. Air traffic control systems. Government agencies. I'm based in the US. The problem…

I think it's reasonable to assume that for at least the next few months, you have a strange form of "diplomatic immunity" for attacks in Russia. No jury in the US would convict you, even in the unlikely event someone wanted to prosecute (which would be political suicide here).

So, have at it.

Post reply on HN