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Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer

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

#481

Post by bamboozled »

ptsneves wrote: post #20
bamboozled wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long do you think it would've taken for them to realize that happened just and reflashed the drones?

You can reflash however you want for some bugs. The deal would be to make it a dormant attack not a destroy all in one go and expose the payload. There have been successful hacks where a buffer overflow was inserted in in a one off write, that was then targeted when needed. If employed carefully in special situations, this could be an important weapon. There are also deeper levels of compromise: why compromise the so…

I still think they'd work it out pretty fast. I'm sure sabotage is pretty high on the list of things the Russians would be thinking about.

It's a good idea, I just think if the goal is to stop the drones working, what better way to do that then to destroy the manufacturing capabilities as often as possible?

Even in the case you describe, you're allowing them to have drones and still do some damage.

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

#482

Post by fer »

JSteph22 wrote: post #422
fer wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia has been a winner by basically no metric other than land and being a shit neighbor. And even land cost them more in soldiers more than the pre-war population that lived there; it's literally a special grave digging operation. Soviet stockpiles of armor are basically depleted; now it's the buggy and moped meta. They've completely failed to support their supposed allies (i.e. Assad, Iran, Armenia). A good chunk…

>And even land cost them more in soldiers more than the pre-war population that lived there This is very easily verified as false. It's hard to take the rest of your comments seriously.

Since the last big movements of the front that's absolutely been the case, though you're right it doesn't apply if you account for the early captures. Once you remove them (Mariupol, Melitopol, Berdyansk), that's very easily verifiable.

Avdiivka had 30-32k pre-war population, estimated 40-47k Russian casualties. Bakhmut had 71k pre-war, Russia suffered an estimated 75k casualties from Wagner alone. Pokrovsk 61k pre-war, ongoing, 21k estimated casualties in January alone, and it's been ongoing for a year.

And beyond cities, the daily casualty rates at most obtain tiny settlements of a few dozen pre-war inhabitants. In the worst case you have the North Kharkiv front with 10s of thousands of casualties and basically a stalemate.

>It's hard to take the rest of your comments seriously.

"One thing is debatable so everything is debatable", I didn't expect this level on HN.

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

#483

Post by reportgunner »

hosh wrote: post #307

The headline of the article called these people cyber activists, and in the text of the article, they were called cybercriminals. Which is it? It reminds me a bit with the situation with privateers during the age of sail. These were often people operating at the edge of the law, or even outright outlaws, given a letter of marque, a license to raid warships and commerce against a specific adversary. I'm sure out on th…

> cyber activists, and in the text of the article, they were called cybercriminals

depends who's side you are on

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

#484

Post by BrandoElFollito »

tmiku wrote: post #477
BrandoElFollito wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nature and place of my work helped to quickly clear this. I volunteered to help because I knew that even broadly planning the recovery, evidence preservation etc. would be completely beyond the capabilities of the two IT folks (they were extremely nice and helpful, and glad that there was someone to help). I was there to draw things on the board and ask the questions that will help to recover. I would not have (n…

That's really cool. I was mostly envisioning hands-on admin stuff (because that's the work I'm most familiar with), but I hadn't thought about how much of a boon it would be to have someone with incident management experience arriving to help out. If you ever do a write-up about your experience, I'd love to read it.

In that case, doing just incident response would not have been enough to be frank. They needed guidance on what to do and what not to do, technically speaking, so that on the one hand, they have hope to start things up, but also to preserve evidence.

Even the sequencing (recover and secure the network, then the AD, then some Tier-2 apps etc.) was something they were not ready for. I cannot blame them - the way these things are managed is really messy, with no clear responsibilities beyond the everyday operations.

My hope is that the continuous attacks on the national infrastructure (such as hospitals) will build a more coordinated and homogenous approach. This would be a great lesson learned.

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

#485

Post by inemesitaffia »

mark-r wrote: post #150
worldsayshi wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel has the benefit of being understandable and fixable by a lot of regular office workers. It's a bit surprising that we don't have that feature as a requirement for most IT infrastructure. It would make it so much more usable.

I know a manufacturing plant that used an Excel spreadsheet to do all its production planning. There was only one person who understood the spreadsheet and could modify it, a consultant who made more than the plant manager. "Understandable and fixable" depends more on the complexity of the application rather than the fact it's in Excel.

Probably cheaper than SAP

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

#486

Post by rkagerer »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #66

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.…

I've worked in tech all my life, and long ago learned how important it is to be impeccably diligent in documenting build processes whenever creating, deploying or adjusting new architecture.

Now it's simply become part of my engineering hygiene - as natural and effortless as brushing my teeth.

Actually drilling your DR is also crucial. If you never put it to the test, your documentation isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

In fact the last few years I've been thinking about ways for these systems to rebuild themselves on a continuous basis. Eg. I'd love a smartphone that competely restores itself from backup every night, even to brand new identical hardware, including secure element artifacts (either via private keys I securely control or reregistering everything in an automated fashion), with no user-noticeable impact.

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

#487

Post by ben_w »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #468
vardump wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no plausible scenario in which it will be favorable for Ukraine If this is true, we're doomed. Everyone will want to have nuclear weapons in order not to end up like Ukraine. After that point it's just a matter of time until something goes wrong. Russia must not win to avoid a nuclear war.

It is unlikely that we will see new nuclear powers. It's not an easy job. We can be sure that Israel or North Korea won't give up, but that does not mean they are going to use the weapons or there will be a full-blown intercontinental war. Looking at current progress in space tech, in 30-40 years the ultimate WMD will be kinetic space weapons anyway.

North Korea and South Africa* getting nukes are both independent proofs that it's not hard for a nation to get nukes. I've seen credible commentators suggesting Ukraine itself is only months away, if it chooses that path.

Less credibly, because the Russian government says a lot that isn't really true, Medvedev has been quoted saying "a number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads".

Once you've got a fission bomb, by all accounts it's not that hard to use it as a primary to power a fusion bomb.

A single 1 MT bomb detonating at low orbital altitude above central USA would likely cause enough physical damage to the power grid to kill 60-90% of the population within a year, even with no shockwave getting anywhere near the ground.

* people often forget they got nukes, they were very quiet about them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_and_weapons_of_ma...

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

#488

Post by ben_w »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #417
dragonwriter wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There will be one at some point. Even if that's true, the content you assume will be in it (even before considering the probability of your predicted content being wrong) may have as much bearing for Russia (or any othe nation’s) near term prospects as the eventual content of the peace deals ending the Israeli-Palestinian war or the US-North Korea war have on any nation’s near-term prospects.

Russia can sustain this war for 4 years more politically (they probably have to finish by 2029, a year before elections), maybe 2-3 years more militarily and economically. I won’t be so sure that Ukraine can last that long, because Ukraine does have people problem and Russia does not. Ukraine even with Western supplies gets a fraction of what Russia currently produces in ammo, missiles, tanks etc. So there is no reas…

If there was any significant difference in their combination of industrial supply and battlefield effectiveness, the front line wouldn't be so slow-moving.

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

#489

Post by Mars008 »

SetTheorist wrote: post #472
Mars008 wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Russians are kiling civilians with drones each day. Same do Ukrainians, don't they? More over, long before they killed civilians and defenders in Iraq and Afghanistan on Americans invitation. Then left without even saying 'sorry'. Since 2014 they were shelling Donetsk just for fun, killing people at random. So, it's more complicated than you'll find in western mass media. Especially in EU where full picture is ille…

No, they do not. Ukrainians have not and do not deliberately target civilians in their war of self-defense against the invading russian army. Russia consistently and deliberately targets civilians. There is no "both sides" here.

> Ukrainians have not and do not deliberately target civilians

There news on Russian side daily of Ukrainians doing exactly this, deliberately targeting civilians. Also usually their own non-combatants who are trying to surrender. This is war crime.

There are dirty tactics in this war which western public will learn about later. For now it's given a rosy optimistic picture approved by Zelinsky office. That's how 'Support Ukraine' is pushed on them. In fact it's 'support the war', as Ukrainians are dying in big numbers. By the way, official number of civilians killed 3 years is lower that in Gaza in 3 months.

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

#490

Post by Mars008 »

TiredOfLife wrote: post #479
Mars008 wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Russians are kiling civilians with drones each day. Same do Ukrainians, don't they? More over, long before they killed civilians and defenders in Iraq and Afghanistan on Americans invitation. Then left without even saying 'sorry'. Since 2014 they were shelling Donetsk just for fun, killing people at random. So, it's more complicated than you'll find in western mass media. Especially in EU where full picture is ille…

in 2014 russia invaded.

Whatever, that's doesn't justify shelling a city. BTW, it's considered Ukrainian territory and those civilians killed by Ukrainian military were Ukrainians. However it was supported by the government up to and including Zelinsky, and by the majority of 'true Ukrainians'. Nobody was prosecuted.
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