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Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer

prm.ua

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Re: Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer

#81

I run a small home lab, about 30 services One day I decided to change my main disk and used the opportunity to rebuild everything from scratch and from backups. I was up in about an hour. And then I spent a week fixing this and that, ah yes I changed that too and, crap, I cannot remember why this thingie is set up this way. And some more. This is a one-man lab, with simple services, all on docker. I also work in IT.…

Modern IT practices don’t really contemplate disaster recovery. Even organisations with strict backup procedures seldom test recovery (most never at all). Everything is quickly strapped together due to teams being understaffed. Preparing infrastructure in a way such that it can easily be recreated is easily twice the effort as “just” setting it up the usual way.

> Modern IT practices don’t really contemplate disaster recovery. Even organisations with strict backup procedures seldom test recovery (most never at all).

I think this is an outdated view. In modern enterprises DR is often one of the most crucial (and difficult) steps in building the whole infra. You select what is crucial for you, you allocate the budget, you test it, and you plan the date of the next test.

However, I'd say it's very rare to do DR of everything. It's terribly expensive and problematic. You need to choose what's really important to you based on defined budgets.

Re: Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer

#82
post #39
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia and all non-usa allies have been the winner. China etc have seen the strategies used in sanctions. They know how to limit their impact now. It's also brought Russia/China/Iran/North Korea and wider Brics together. It's been a disaster for the west. The measure of success was Russia weakened and ideally Putin weakened or gone. And instead Russia have shrugged off the sanctions, and Putin is much stronger. And t…

China has been a big winner, it can now get cheap energy and it gets to set Russia whatever conditions it pleases. Russia is now utterly dependent on China for many imports. Russia itself has been the biggest loser. Massive budget deficits, massive inflation. 1M of its smartest people have moved abroad. 1M Russian casualties in the war. Demographics and economy are disastrous. That and Russia is now a pariah state. N…

I mostly agree, except the pariah state part.

Russia is hedging that the "pariah state" label will wear off pretty quickly. The current US government has as recently as March floated the idea of normalising business ties, and constantly flip-flops it's position.

However, the biggest loser has definitely been Europe (including Britain). High energy prices have cascaded the cost of living crisis, which in turn has led to a rightward shift in politics. As a continent, we are unprepared for any sort of defence, having used the US as a backstop for years and now the US constantly toys with the idea of dropping NATO support. Alone, we don't have enough manpower, ammunition, and we haven't been keeping up with the evolution of modern warfare (drones and related technology) taking place in the Russo-Ukrainian war.

Re: Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer

#83
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia has 1 million in casualties and has failed to capture Ukraine. You really think you can claim it was a "win" because now all their experienced soldiers are dead and their strategy has been reduced to "run towards the enemy and hopefully some of you won't be killed and thus we can capture another field"?

Russia has a population of 144m. 1m is not a lot Edit: as per my comment below, casualties are not deaths. It's a wider definition.

That includes women, children and elderly. If you count fighting age men only, 1M becomes significant. If you count men actually available for draft, you're already at 10% loss.

Re: Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer

#84
post #54
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With more than 1.2M dead or out of service injured, Russia is spent. It's why North Korean troops had to be deployed. All they can effectivley do, until they grow new soldiers, is defense. Sure they can bomb from afar. But even of they take the Ukraine now, they have no force to hold it with.

They were never going to achieve a full takeover of Ukraine though. Large mass size and the people wouldn't accept them.

That's why RIA had an article announcing the successful taking of Ukraine ready and published it by mistake, right: https://web.archive.org/web/20220226051154/https://ria.ru/20...

Right? Right? Putin totally only planned a multi-year stalemate where he lost his best troops on a dash to capture Kyiv. Totally!

Re: Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer

#85
> The attack destroyed over 47 TB of critical data,

I'm very dubious that there would be such an amount of “critical” data pretty much anywhere, besides the banking and insurance sector. And particularly not at a drone manufacturer.

Re: Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point being made is that Western agencies (5-eyes) would give Ukranian intelligence the button to push (indirect action) and not push it themselves (direct action).

Why would that be the case? Ukraine has a very large IT sector and they have a lot of good IT security specialists. To be honest, a lot of cybercriminals have been from Ukraine. So I don't see why it would be the case that Ukraine could not have done this by themselves. They have done previous attacks by themselves. I don't see why that would be the case. It would kind of be like saying, "Oh, if Russia does a cyberat…

That is not how I read the parent comment. I read it as US making Ukraine do what US wanted to do.

Re: Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer

#87
post #72

I wonder to what extent either side is worried about the firmware on the drones. Somehow getting tampered-with firmware onto the drones that your enemy is using seems like it would be valuable.

Very interesting but risky (easy to discover and renders the whole operation ineffective). So I believe what they did was heavy-handed but the most reasonable.

Re: Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer

#88
post #72

I wonder to what extent either side is worried about the firmware on the drones. Somehow getting tampered-with firmware onto the drones that your enemy is using seems like it would be valuable.

Yeh, it would seem in some ways more useful than shutting down the factory; if you gently made all the drones do something, like let them be remote controlled, or bomb the place they were launched from.

Re: Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer

#89
post #2

Working for a company in Germany which is planing production 3 months in advance using printed Excel sheets. The migration of ERP system gone wrong and nobody knows how to fix it. Production management tries to hide this fact and does not talk to the engineering department. This will go for years, consultants will gather their fees for non functional system. Obviously IT infrastructure is not needed for manufacturing…

Without software, drones are useless. I suppose they can still assemble manually operated quadcopters if they know their inventory by heart, but they will be unable to produce more parts by 3D printing or drones capable of stable flight, autonomous operations, surveillance or any more advanced use cases. Even remote control is probably out of the picture.

Re: Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern IT practices don’t really contemplate disaster recovery. Even organisations with strict backup procedures seldom test recovery (most never at all). Everything is quickly strapped together due to teams being understaffed. Preparing infrastructure in a way such that it can easily be recreated is easily twice the effort as “just” setting it up the usual way.

> Modern IT practices don’t really contemplate disaster recovery. Even organisations with strict backup procedures seldom test recovery (most never at all). I think this is an outdated view. In modern enterprises DR is often one of the most crucial (and difficult) steps in building the whole infra. You select what is crucial for you, you allocate the budget, you test it, and you plan the date of the next test. Howeve…

Budgets - and lowering them - win every time. I do budgeting and forecasting for SaaS companies and this kind of work is always the first cut
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