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Poland's energy grid was targeted by never-before-seen wiper malware

arstechnica.com

141–150 of 158 posts

Re: Poland's energy grid was targeted by never-before-seen wiper malware

#141
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does NATO actually threaten Russia? It threatens mobsters racket profits, but it will not start any actual fight.

[flagged]

Context matters a lot.

You insert subtle hints of USSR/Russia being benevolent or good. (“Left without blood”, “victorious at enormous cost”)

This context is not real. There was blood since ww2. And major part of that ww2 cost you mentioned, was actually paid by Ukraine itself.

Countries joining NATO, did so not because they want to conquer Russia. (Are you proposing that Estonia wants to conquer Russia?)

Up until recently, European defence budgets were laughable. If decisions would be done based on actual risk analysis, it would be clear that NATO was not threatning to attack.

> Even if you were right , is the risk you may be wrong acceptable when it comes to your national security?

Yes, for Russia it will always be beneficial that all its neighbours are weak puppet states.

I concede all events in history (incl. Ukraine invitation) do lead us to this moment. But this is a bit of nitpicking, everybody see who is the psycho and everybody must deal with it.

Re: Poland's energy grid was targeted by never-before-seen wiper malware

#142

Poland has a high alertness status for like 5 years now. So there was time to be prepared.

There's some news about some psy-op or some damage every couple of days. We hear about "Russian trolls" and influencing the political discourse. I wonder if there is any symmetrical response to this happening. How about unleashing psy-ops and "Western trolls" in Runet? Is Europe in purely defensive mode?

EU-based troll farms are for long time in RUnet already (i.e. FRF) along with EU-aligned russian language media who spread certain narratives.

Re: Poland's energy grid was targeted by never-before-seen wiper malware

#143
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A tank is designed for war. Infrastructure is designed to serve some other utility. Claiming it should also be hardened against (cyber) war is acknowledging that there is an aggressor performing an attack of war, not that the infrastructure is failing the utility it was designed for. It's fine to have this view that software should be defect free and hardened against sophisticated nation-state attackers, but it stret…

okay, so you think just attaching PLCs to an rs485-to-ethernet adapter and connecting it straight unauthenticated to the internet, and then calling it a day is simply perfectly reasonable, since "well.. cant expect to harden against cyber warfare!! no defect!!!" ? because this is the kind of stuff infrastructure things do, along with MANY other things. Im sure not all infrastructure does it, but plenty do. This is no…

Well, your unsourced assertions sound dramatically incompetent, but the linked article says the Russian cyberattack on Ukraine in 2015 was the first malware caused blackout, and the titular event of the article failed to cause harm, which kind of paints a different picture.

I’ll therefore decline to comment on your assertions. I will acknowledge it’s time to consider Russian interference as expected if you are designing an internet connected system, fine, but it looks like it’s non trivial to fatally compromise these systems already.

Re: Poland's energy grid was targeted by never-before-seen wiper malware

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is the bureaucratic "doubt" about who did what. Which, with the current zeit geist, should really be minimized to almost zero

Blame everything on X group i don’t like is a bold move

We have two clear videos of federal USA employees executing citizens.

What stopa the execution of legal system? The claim that we cant know 100% of the facts.

In reality, theres little to dispute with the facts. Theres simply groups of true believers and those who think we need more clarity.

Those two forces alloq the continuation of violations

Re: Poland's energy grid was targeted by never-before-seen wiper malware

#145
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Berlin recently had a blackdown caused by domestic terrorists.

Is everyone talking about domestic terrorism or Putin and the war in Ukraine? Or are you thinking the domestic terrorism is not that domestic and it’s Putin doing it?

IMO both recent cuts were at minimum funded and encouraged by Russia. But the conversations I've seen here in Berlin that discuss the power cuts can be enumerated using only thumbs, and we've had quite a few severe weather warnings vs two power failure warnings.

There's also occasional anti-NATO "stop the war" marches, and some longer-duration pro-Ukraine vigils above the Brandenburger Tor U-Bahn station.

Re: Poland's energy grid was targeted by never-before-seen wiper malware

#146
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kyiv. And "enjoying their daily lives" diminishes real tragedies of Ukrainians' daily lives.

I beg to differ. Calling going out to a gym, cafe, club or a bar during wartime, as anything other than enjoying life, diminishes the real tragedy of those who are fighting on the front line and don't enjoy such leisure activities. Some people are fortunate enough that they can still get to enjoy life even if their country is in a war, as just like in every war ever, not everyone is affected equally.

> not everyone is affected equally

I agree. However if we talk about Kyiv, I'd like to remind you that electricity is available 2-4 hours per day, in some regions there has been no water nor heating for the last week. Everyone I know are extremely stressed, and if anyone visits their gym, it's not to enjoy life, but to not slip into total despair.

Re: Poland's energy grid was targeted by never-before-seen wiper malware

#147
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

before anyone jumps on the pedantry bandwagon, its worth noting that even though open war hasn’t been called: the attacks on infrastructure especially cyber warfare is extremely active and, crucially, direct. It is totally fair to say that in a digital context, Russia is absolutely at war with Europe. As far as I can tell, they don’t even try to hide it.

Not to mention the information war they have been waging globally since 2016

The US, UK, and Western powers have been waging information war for far longer than 2016. Look at Canadian PM Mark Carney's latest speech at Davos, he admits the 'Rules based international order' was a fiction, and the US has had a very long history of covert operations, 'enhanced interrogation', destabilization campaigns, funding of terrorists, propping up of dictators, bombing and invading of many countries...

To be specific consider how many lies have been told by the American mainstream media around the narratives of Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Syria, Libya, etc. Israel has the most surveilled and well defended border in the world, the Mossad is sophisticated enough to launch pager attacks to decapitate Hezbollah leadership, yet somehow they got caught with their pants down and Hamas combatants could raid their country for 12 hours without a response. The US also had funded Osama bin Laden in the 1980s, knew Al Qaeda was plotting another attack on the WTC, and the Neocons in the Bush administration wanted a new Pearl Harbor as outlined in the Project for a New American Century.

Russia is not uniquely or even particularly evil here, it's entirely rational for them to not want a major neighbor to join an enemy alliance. Look at how America has treated Cuba for decades. People should stop being so naive.

Re: Poland's energy grid was targeted by never-before-seen wiper malware

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blame everything on X group i don’t like is a bold move

We have two clear videos of federal USA employees executing citizens. What stopa the execution of legal system? The claim that we cant know 100% of the facts. In reality, theres little to dispute with the facts. Theres simply groups of true believers and those who think we need more clarity. Those two forces alloq the continuation of violations

I thought you were talking about Russian hacking

Re: Poland's energy grid was targeted by never-before-seen wiper malware

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW it seems Russia's trolling activities took a pretty significant hit after Prigozhin fell out of a window in 2023, as the "Internet Research Agency" was one of his ventures.

Probably just caused outsourcing to india and china.

It did. There are loads of "Polish" patriots on X located in India.
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