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

How cybercriminals have been affected by the war in Ukraine

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 30 posts

Re: How cybercriminals have been affected by the war in Ukraine

#11

Post by yamazakiwi »

sswezey wrote: post #8
photochemsyn wrote: post #5

One of the more interesting take-home lessons is that low-tech systems are a good passive defense against high-tech cyberattacks (aka, 'going autistic'). From the linked Nov 30 Economist article, "Lessons From Russia's Cyber-War in Ukraine": https://archive.ph/MJP0J > "Ukrainian resilience was helped, paradoxically, by the primitive nature of many of its industrial-control systems—inherited from Soviet days and not y…

What do you mean by 'going autistic'?

It made me think of the show Ghost in the Shell: SOC, with the "autistic" firewall hacker orphans.

Re: How cybercriminals have been affected by the war in Ukraine

#12

Post by KineticLensman »

Compared with some of the pre-war predictions, the visible effects of Russian cyber-campaigns have been somewhat underwhelming. E.g. the Ukrainian power grid remained largely online until the Russians started to launch physical attacks on the infrastructure. Perhaps they've already squandered their best assets (e.g. zero-days) or are keeping them for later / other enemies.

Re: How cybercriminals have been affected by the war in Ukraine

#13

Post by kkfx »

It's not a matter of IT systems but a matter of CURRENT IT systems, who happen to be connected on public network even when there are not much reasons to do so, who happen to be full of proprietary crapware developed in awful ways nobody knows really how anything works etc.

Let's play a game: how many time we will need to see ALL cars of a certain brand bricked by a bad OTA upgrade or a deliberate attack? It's a matter of IT/cracking OR a matter of current commercial-drive bad IT evolution?

Try to read a bit about recent famous aqueduct sabotages like

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/us-government...

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-undet...

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1765767

and so on. It's really a matter of hacking and cracking? Honestly my own personal answer is no. It's a matter of widespread ignorance and business practice.

Re: How cybercriminals have been affected by the war in Ukraine

#17

Post by anonporridge »

photochemsyn wrote: post #10
sswezey wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by 'going autistic'?

It's a Ghost In The Shell reference... a characteristic of autistic behavior is disconnection from other people, not paying attention and so on, so if you disconnect a power plant's control system from Internet, it's not vulnerable to being attacked over the Internet (which raises other problems, like how do you ramp power production up or down to meet varying demand, etc.).

My immediate thought is that "going autistic" could also be seen as insulating yourself from common social engineering attacks.

A straight male is fairly easily exploited by an attractive female fluttering her eyelashes at him. Autistic mode could be seen as a defense against this kind of attack, by being oblivious to the flirting and missing the sexual signalling completely.

One could even argue that social values like enforced monogamy and the taboo of adultery simulate this "autistic" behavior in neurotypical individuals. These moral values could have been naturally selected for in cultural evolution to protect social groups from infiltration from malicious outsiders.

Re: How cybercriminals have been affected by the war in Ukraine

#18

Post by dang »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #4

TL;DR: Black hats are concentrating more on destruction instead of ransoming data, on both Ukrainian and Russian sides. Nothing about white hats, grey hats is in the article. Single example of black hat weaponization (Conti), without external reference. (ChatGPT?)

The submitted title was "Black hats, white hats, grey hats" - we've changed it to the article title now.

Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(Sometimes the publications change their own titles, in which case of course the submitter is not at fault.)

Re: How cybercriminals have been affected by the war in Ukraine

#19

Post by rm_-rf_slash »

KineticLensman wrote: post #12

Compared with some of the pre-war predictions, the visible effects of Russian cyber-campaigns have been somewhat underwhelming. E.g. the Ukrainian power grid remained largely online until the Russians started to launch physical attacks on the infrastructure. Perhaps they've already squandered their best assets (e.g. zero-days) or are keeping them for later / other enemies.

They likely have used their good cyber weapons already and are now less useful than suicide drones and cruise missiles.

Knock out a grid with cyber, ok the enemy is prepared and can do a hard reset. Power loss of a few minutes, hours at most. Then that attack vector is gone as cyber defenses are put in place.

Blow up a substation, you have bigger problems. Power loss for several hours or days.

Russia can still do “low tech” cyber attacks like DDoS, but this war is making a case for cyber weapons being more useful during pseudo-peacetime clandestine espionage than a consistently equivalent tool to bullets and bombs.

Re: How cybercriminals have been affected by the war in Ukraine

#20

Post by pydry »

hutzlibu wrote: post #6
photochemsyn wrote: post #5

One of the more interesting take-home lessons is that low-tech systems are a good passive defense against high-tech cyberattacks (aka, 'going autistic'). From the linked Nov 30 Economist article, "Lessons From Russia's Cyber-War in Ukraine": https://archive.ph/MJP0J > "Ukrainian resilience was helped, paradoxically, by the primitive nature of many of its industrial-control systems—inherited from Soviet days and not y…

"It seems fairly obvious that Russia had little to gain from blowing up its own gas pipelines to Europe" The best argument I heard is, that russia has a long term legal binding contract with germany to deliver cheap gas. Not delivering means more economical damage in the shape as absurd as this whole charade sounds. So blowing it up means not being legally responsible for not fulfilling the contract. Did they do it?…

They already had and were using a legal pretext for not delivering the gas.
Post reply on HN