Tom Uren

@tom.risky.biz

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Author of the Seriously Risky Business cyber security newsletter

Vitiuk described Russian cyber operations against Ukraine as a "cyber war" with destructive campaigns against Ukraine starting in 2014, eight years before the full-scale invasion. Significant destructive cyber operations he cited included NotPetya, electricity network attacks in 2015 and 2016 and a less well-known attempt to cause a train collision by interfering with a railroad control system. Vitiuk said these incidents motivated Ukraine to improve its cyber security. "During that time, we improved our legislation, we adopted a new cybersecurity strategy," Vitiuk said. "We invented tools and techniques that are actually effective [in] countering these Russian aggressive potential cyber attacks." The number of cyber attacks the SBU dealt with that it believes comes from Russia have grown fivefold between 2020 and 2022. As a result, well before the physical invasion, the SBU had tremendous experience remediating and recovering from Russian attacks. Today, SBU deals with 10 to 15 "se
While Russia views increasing control over data as a way of preventing its espionage operations being compromised, the reality is that editing personal information 'in situ' is a band aid rather than a cure. This may reduce the amount of information available to researchers in the future, but Bellingcat has been harvesting leaked data sources for years. And historical data is useful to future investigations: Bellingcat has acquired dozens of leaked databases over the past few years, giving us a large number of data points to cross-reference and verify any new data we acquire. If the birth date of an FSB officer in an explosive new dossier does not match that of a Moscow oblast vehicle registration database from 2013, then something is amiss — but we rarely run into such issues, and did not have any of these contradictions in this investigation.
Risky Business News has more detail on Kislitsin's case, but also points out that this isn't the first time that Russians accused of cyber crime have been the subject of competing extradition processes. Cimpanu's article lists five previous examples dating back to as early as 2012: We've seen this before many times. Every time a big Russian hacker gets arrested outside Russia's borders, Russian authorities hocus-pocus some charges out of a hat and try to get him back home like the suspects are some sort of national treasure. Gavin Wilde, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Institute and expert on Russian cyber operations, told Seriously Risky Business he thinks Russia's actions are primarily motivated by its desire to be viewed as an equal to the US. Extradition efforts require a response because, historically, the law in Russia is used as "a tool to enable the powers that be, lending a veneer of credibility to crude authoritarianism". Given that world view, US indictments of Russian hacke