Russian Cyberspies Targeted MH17 Crash Investigation (trendmicro.com) 88
itwbennett writes: Security researchers from Trend Micro have found evidence that the Pawn Storm cyberespionage group set up rogue VPN and SFTP servers to target Dutch Safety Board employees before and after the report on the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) was finalized. It is likely that the rogue servers were set up with the goal of phishing login credentials from people involved in the MH17 crash investigation in order to obtain access to confidential information, the researchers said.
First post not from Saint Petersburg` (Score:1, Funny)
Linked to the Russians, you say? (Score:2, Troll)
Maybe the US and Europe should look into developing a program like that.
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How charming that you think the US _doesnt_.
How charming that you didn't hear that loud WHOOSH.
Who is surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
For a country that shot a passenger airliner to begin with — and not for the first time [wikipedia.org] — for such a country to attempt to affect the investigation of the crime is no surprise at all. What may be surprising, is that none of the Dutch officials involved were killed or blackmailed. But it ain't over yet, is it?..
Re:Who is surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
They just can't do that (Score:5, Informative)
Internal propaganda keeps telling to the Russian audience of 150 million people that Russia does not participate, and that all the weapons, heavy flamethrowers, drones and tanks, are merely bought at military surplus stores.
Entire story would just collapse.
Russia does have a history of keeping the parallel history and making it official.
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That and the fact that Putin is a coward who would rather kill a few thousand people more than admitting that he might have misjudged something.
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Re:They just can't do that (Score:4, Interesting)
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Sure they could. They'd only have needed to have done a little handwavium over where the BUK launcher used actually came from (not too much of a stretch given that the Ukrainian military operates the launchers)
The report states that the explosive head of the BUK was of the type 9N314M, a newer type of explosive head that was never supplied to the Ukrainian army. This was proven by the typical shapes of this head's load, that were retrieved from the bodies of the crew.
Interestingly, this conclusion was first made by the Russian members of the investigation team, shortly before they were being recalled to Moscow.
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Their latest propaganda line by the Russians is "the report is flawed, as the Russian findings were not taken into account" and that Russia was "kept out of the loop of the investigation". Which, of course, is total BS [bellingcat.com].
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Internal propaganda keeps telling to the Russian audience of 150 million people that Russia does not participate, and that all the weapons, heavy flamethrowers, drones and tanks, are merely bought at military surplus stores.
Entire story would just collapse.
Russia does have a history of keeping the parallel history and making it official.
They still could have come up with a better story than they did. ie:
"The rebels stole a loaded BUK from a Ukrainian base (let the Ukrainian's try to disprove that) and tragically shot down a civilian airliner by accident! Oh and we think the Ukrainians left the civilian airspace open to deliberately confuse the rebels about which planes were safe to shoot down."
If Russia pushes that narrative they've instantly acknowledged the obvious with the only major downside being that if the DPR survives they'll proba
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Internal propaganda keeps telling to the Russian audience of 150 million people that Russia does not participate, and that all the weapons, heavy flamethrowers, drones and tanks, are merely bought at military surplus stores.
And this is different from the US how?
Re:Who is surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
False. Operating the Buk system [wikipedia.org] is too complicated for "peaceful coal-miners" to have done it — certainly not the mere 3 months into the insurrection. It was Russian military — even if disguised as locals. Whether they targeted a passenger liner by mistake or deliberately is still a question, but it obviously was not the rebellious locals.
For an accusation of such gravity, you better have more solid citations than your own "pretty sure". Do you?
First of all, that [wikipedia.org] was an honest mistake. Second, Ukraine hasn't denied it. And third — and most intriguing — the missile was fired from Crimea and the servicemen responsible are now all Russians. Temporarily.
Whether that's true or not, how is this relevant to the conversation?..
So?.. Your desperation in trying to switch the topic is really showing. Mr. Kiselev would've done a better job — were he not busy blaming some non-existent Ukrainian jets for the crime [globalresearch.ca].
Why imagine it in Mexico, when saw it actually happen in Cuba and, more recently, Venezuela? No passenger airliners were shot down in either place...
Go back to watching Kremlin-TV...
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False. Operating the Buk system is too complicated for "peaceful coal-miners" to have done it
Luckily for the rebels, many of them have military experience in the Ukrainian army. Some may even have been trained on firing the BUK anti-aircraft system, given that Ukraine also has that.
For an accusation of such gravity, you better have more solid citations than your own "pretty sure". Do you?
Well, there's the Iranian one for a start..
First of all, that was an honest mistake
Interesting that you don't acknowledge that MH17 is almost certainly an honest mistake too.
Go back to watching Kremlin-TV...
Comically I just noticed your user name. You're falling apart in our other debate too. You clearly have no fucking idea do you.
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False. Ukrainian army prior to 2014 was, for most intents and purposes, non-existent. Nobody trained in the use of Buk.
The claim was, there is "a good number of the commercial airplanes which were shot down could be attributed to the US" (emphasis mine). All you can name is one. Why don't you offer a longer list?
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False. Operating the Buk system [wikipedia.org] is too complicated for "peaceful coal-miners" to have done it — certainly not the mere 3 months into the insurrection. It was Russian military — even if disguised as locals.
Well it apparently was too complicated since they shot down the wrong kind of plane. There's a big difference between experts that years of military training creates and a couple weeks back in Russia being taught which buttons to push in order to shoot down planes. I'm not saying it was locals (or foreign volunteers) for certain, but I don't think we can really know.
Whether they targeted a passenger liner by mistake or deliberately is still a question, but it obviously was not the rebellious locals.
Why is that a question? What possible motive would the rebels have for shooting down a civilian airliner? Why claim to have shot down an AN-26
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The system is manned by an officer and two enlisted men — conscripts with no more than 2 years in the military total, including basic training. There are no "years of experience".
Russia merely having provided such weapons is bad enough. Russia also providing training, however poor, is worse.
So much worse, the question of wheth
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I'm pretty sure a good number of the commercial airplanes which were shot down could be attributed to the US.
For an accusation of such gravity, you better have more solid citations than your own "pretty sure". Do you?
Would you believe one [wikipedia.org] is a pretty good number? Of course, that was different, right? But hey, it's not like we shouldn't be keeping Russia in a box or anything. Casualties of war... shit happens
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First: looks like operating a SAM was too complicated for the regular army, so what do you expect of insurgents? Buk has a certain operating mode for unskilled operators, and this mode ignores IFF and basically just shoots down the first available aircraft. I guess this is exactly what happ
Re:Who is surprised? (Score:5, Informative)
Because random untrained individuals can operate a SAM site?
Since when does the US give SAM sites to random rebel groups? The US doesn't even give (and actively blocks attempts to give) even groups it supports MANPADs, let alone SAM sites. The latter poses a vastly greater threat to commercial airliners - MANPADs can only hit them shortly after takeoff or shortly before landing, while SAM sites can hit them during cruise phase. They're also far more complicated systems and require a lot more training.
So peacetime accidents are equivalent to pumping military hardware and troops into a neighboring country to try to rip off part of it and shooting at anything that flies without warning civil aviation that you're supplying hardware that can shoot their planes down? And FYI, Russia initially tried to hide the fact that Ukraine had accidentally shot down Siberia Airlines Flight 1812, because they were actively propping up Ukraine's then government, claiming that it was impossible for the S200 to overshoot by 250 kilometers. And in the former case the US military made 10 attempts to hail Flight 655, three of which it received, and none of which it responded to.
In the former case, Ukraine initially denied its culpability, but later admitted it. In the latter case, the US admitted its involvement pretty much immediately. Russia to this date continues to deny, obfuscate, and apparently, hack too to try to avoid culpability.
Oh yes, the US clearly cares so tremendously much for Ukraine - that's why they won't even toss them a single Javelin, let alone heavy hardware, to help them defend their country, right? Clearly Russia had no choice but to flood the country with troops and vast amounts of heavy military hardware!
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Since when does the US give SAM sites to random rebel groups? The US doesn't even give (and actively blocks attempts to give) even groups it supports MANPADs, let alone SAM sites.
The BUK launcher isn't a SAM site. The US have been giving anti-air missiles to random rebel groups since the 80s, or haven't you heard about the Afghans using them to take down Russian Hind helicopters?
Re:Who is surprised? (Score:4, Informative)
BUK is a surface to air system. It's mobile (vehicle mounted) rather than fixed, but that's usually the case these days. What it isn't is a MANPAD.
The US stopped giving anti-air missiles to rebel groups after the late 80s, after proliferation concerns were raised about the Stingers in Afghanistan. Nowadays the US on a rather anti-MANPAD crusade, including a MANPAD buyback program that buys MANPADs from anywhere, no questions asked, spending a small fortune ($40M/year) to try to get them off the black market.
Honestly, I think the US has gone a bit overboard in its anti-MANPAD obsession. They let Syria get flooded with TOWs in batches of 250-500 with a potential supply of over 13.000 (the amount that they sold to Saudi Arabia for that purpose), but finds the concept of a single MANPAD - which requires that you smuggle it to near the airport if you want to hit a commercial plane - unthinkable. A TOW can of course take out a passenger train, a truck carrying hazardous waste, attack nuclear facilities, hit a plane on the ground, etc. But the US has this weird distinction of "MANPADs = Unthinkable, Antitank = Use as many as you need". That's not to say that the TOWs are unrestricted - they have a pretty good policy for their distribution, requiring returning the spent tubes and filming the attacks and a bunch of other things; of the thousands that have been sent only 2-4 are believed to have been captured by al-Nusra, who's already used some if not all of them. But still...
And with the anti-MANPAD crusade, you'd think that they'd have poured more money into anti-proliferation countermeasures. Yet you don't see that hardly at all. In fact, it looks like the next version of the Grom is going to be the first anti-proliferation MANPAD, and that's Polish. And sometimes people talk about "ways anti-proliferation measures could be cheated", but these arguments are usually based around really dumb implementations of anti-proliferation measures. They don't have to be limited to electronic lockout mechanisms, you can have the missiles additionally be literally designed to degrade, with a "guaranteed to still work" time of X months and a "guaranteed to not work" time of Y months. Degradation isn't some unusual thing, it's much harder to *stop* than to cause. Replace for example gold interconnects on the circuitboards with sulfrous silver, or even calcium metal. Great conductor in the beginning, but it'll oxidize fast, especially if moist. Seal it in a casing with silica gel to slow the rate of decay to the desired length. Anyone opening the casing would only make it degrade even faster. Have the explosives and propellant similarly degrade so that for X months they're still fine, but after Y months they're no longer useful. You could even have the casing rust - and probably save yourself money in the process.
You can easily make it to the point where it'd be far, far easier to make a new MANPAD than to fix the degrading one.
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To be fair, there are so many Russian designed RPGs out there that a few thousand TOW missiles aren't going to make all that much of a difference.
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This may be immaterial and I can, in no way, speak for the simplicity of this specific equipment. I have, on the other hand, used a great deal of military hardware - vehicular and weapons. Much of it is really trivial to operate and has very easy to understand documentation available - very complete and exacting documentation. Add to that the familiarity, these civilians were likely conscripts at one point, and it's quite possible that a bunch of peasant farmers could accidentally shoot down a plane. Hell,
Re:Who is surprised? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think it's about the slap on the wrist for culpability they might have got (or not, given what happened in the aftermath of all the events you listed), and others like KAL007 and KAL902, it's about maintaining the pretense that they have no official involvement on the ground. Basically, in their panic after MH17 was shot down, the Russian government rushed out a story to maintain that pretense that was never going to stand up to scrutiny instead of taking their time and coming up with something that might at least have raised enough doubt. Now they are stuck with either trying to defend a story that has more holes in it than the fuselage of MH17 or changing their story and risking blowing away the fiction of their non-involvement they have spun for their own people.
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"Russian personnel ... were almost certainly on hand when the BUK was used since a BUK apparently requires override to enable it to fire at a commercial aircraft that was presumably broadcasting its IFF, something untrained personnel wouldn't have been likely to know how to do."
What I don't get about your theory is that if the Russian personnel had enough experience to know what they were doing (as you say) then they were deliberately trying to bring a commercial jet down. That seems unlikely given the pa
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It was not Russia who shot down MH17, it was rebels from Ukraine which were armed by Russia
I'm not sure that's certain. It may have been rebels using Russia supplied equipment, or there may have been Russians operating the equipment too.
We'll probably never find out.
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...I'm not sure that's certain. It may have been rebels using Russia supplied equipment, or there may have been Russians operating the equipment too.
Just giving "untrained" rebels, who are operating on the Russian border, a BUK system without any oversight or command and control would endanger Russian aircraft in the region as well. I don't think the Russians would be that stupid.
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Well, I personally believe you. But I'm keeping a distinction between personal belief and the available evidence, and the evidence is that the rebels were claiming credit for shooting down aircraft at the time - including MH17.
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In fairness the USA has shot down airliners and made plenty of similar mistakes in the past (MSF bombing, anyone?). So have other countries.
Thing is, most countries would at least be honest admit their mistake, and if Russia had admitted they provided their separatists the missile in question it wouldn't have invited some debate and condemnation but blown over fairly quickly. But Putin's administration is so steeped in Soviet-era propaganda they think they can create whatever reality they want by inventing
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In fairness the USA has shot down airliners and made plenty of similar mistakes in the past (MSF bombing, anyone?). So have other countries.
Thing is, most countries would at least be honest admit their mistake, and if Russia had admitted they provided their separatists the missile in question it wouldn't have invited some debate and condemnation but blown over fairly quickly. But Putin's administration is so steeped in Soviet-era propaganda they think they can create whatever reality they want by inventing their own "truth*".
While that may work on the faithful chauvinists, to the rest of the world (and Russians in the age of the Internet and satellite TV) it just makes them look like dangerous idiots, not to mention drags out this whole incident far longer than necessary.
* insert Pravda joke here
yea... what if it really was not Russia though? We may never know. And neither Russia nor Ukraine may not know. There are untrained idiots with rocket launchers on both sides. The state of Ukrainian army is not very safety assuring. Also, tracing a clear path of ownership of prehistoric weapons like BUK is nearly impossible. It is Soviet-made, not manufactured or used in Russia for 2 decades, so they would have had to try really hard to produce one. But they are still on active duty in the Ukrainian army.
Th
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I think the attempt to blame Russia for INTENTIONALLY shooting down the plane is completely baseless, and fully manufactured.
Yeah, it's curious seeing the Dutch politicians demand criminal charges - that aren't against the fuckwits flying civilian aircraft through a warzone in which multi-engine aircraft have recently been shot down.
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Then of course the rebels could have gained them in battle from the Ukrainians, tried to shoot, and failed. It is a complex system to navigate and aim, and requires trained personnel. Or Ukrainian army conducted an exercise that misfired, which is quite possible, knowing the sad state of affairs there
No, they could not. The load on the BUK contained specific shapes that were retrieved from the bodies of the crew, which prove that the BUK's load was of the type 9N314M. That Ukrainian army has never been in possession of that type.
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it's not for international discussions sake that puting is denying it.
putin is saying in Russia that Russia does not participate, that there is no russian soldiers dying in ukraine and so forth - and in current russia if you say otherwise you're an undesirable and potentially subject to.. well, getting shot in the back near kremlin to put bluntly.
the international news following russians are being scared into being quiet or just outright leaving the country so there's that - also a typical russian has been
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They stole the launcher from Ukrainian army and then fired their new toy.
Now that's total bullshit. Congratulations on outing yourself as a Russian astroturfer.
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They stole the launcher from Ukrainian army and then fired their new toy.....
If that were the case it would pose an equal danger to Russian aircraft operating in the region. Russia would have an interest in taking said new toy off of their hands.
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In Soviet Russia... (Score:2)
Trend Micro and the Russian Cyberspies .. (Score:3)
Equation: The Death Star of Malware Galaxy [securelist.com]
But How??? (Score:2)
Let's put the political stuff aside for a moment and look at the technical side. How did the attackers operate? A fake mail/vpn server? How is that supposed to work?
Or are we talking about standard script kiddie attacks (seeen by every site on the web) interpreted by Trend Micro as Russian government attacks? Let's not forget that this is a great commercial message for Trend Micro. Is this stuff for real or is someone trying to scare us?
Obviously there are lots of Russian hackers/script kiddies who are angr
Active protection system for civil aircrafts (Score:2)
For example, an IR-decoy flares system. It is small and relatively cheap.
The ejection seats would also be useful. In case of an Air France crash into the ocean when the airplane just stalled and fell down from the sky, it would save hundreds of passengers.
Civil Aircraft construction industry is stagnating. It has completely bureaucratized and politicized. Ther
Tonkin's Gulf redux. (Score:2)
Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) is the Tonkins Gulf incident of Eurasia, except thsi time something DID happen, but the attribution is fake. Read the headlines, read the incessant drumbeat against Russia. This is being used to whip the US into approviing some military interventionism in the Ukraine.
It's total bullshit. Just like the US, Russia has tons of their weapons in the hands of people they do not directly control every action of. So we really have no hope of finding out who fired that missile and