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The Military

How Russians - and Ukranians - are Using Stolen Data (apnews.com) 48

Posted by EditorDavid from the truth-and-consequences dept.
While Russia's "relentless digital assaults" on Ukraine might seem less damaging than anticipated, the attacks actually focused on a different goal with "chilling potential consequences," reports the Associated Press. "Data collection."

Even in an early February blog post, Microsoft said Russia's intelligence agency had tried "exfiltrating sensitive information" over the previous six months from military, government, military, judiciary and law enforcement agencies.

The AP reports: Ukrainian agencies breached on the eve of the February 24 invasion include the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which oversees the police, national guard and border patrol. A month earlier, a national database of automobile insurance policies was raided during a diversionary cyberattack that defaced Ukrainian websites. The hacks, paired with prewar data theft, likely armed Russia with extensive details on much of Ukraine's population, cybersecurity and military intelligence analysts say. It's information Russia can use to identify and locate Ukrainians most likely to resist an occupation, and potentially target them for internment or worse.

"Fantastically useful information if you're planning an occupation," Jack Watling, a military analyst at the U.K. think tank Royal United Services Institute, said of the auto insurance data, "knowing exactly which car everyone drives and where they live and all that."

As the digital age evolves, information dominance is increasingly wielded for social control, as China has shown in its repression of the Uyghur minority. It was no surprise to Ukrainian officials that a prewar priority for Russia would be compiling information on committed patriots. "The idea was to kill or imprison these people at the early stages of occupation," Victor Zhora, a senior Ukrainian cyber defense official, alleged.... There is little doubt political targeting is a goal. Ukraine says Russian forces have killed and kidnapped local leaders where they grab territory....

The Ukrainian government says the Jan. 14 auto insurance hack resulted in the pilfering of up to 80% of Ukrainian policies registered with the Motor Transport Bureau.
But the article also points out that Ukraine also "appears to have done significant data collection — quietly assisted by the U.S., the U.K., and other partners — targeting Russian soldiers, spies and police, including rich geolocation data." Serhii Demediuk [deputy secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council] said the country knows "exactly where and when a particular serviceman crossed the border with Ukraine, in which occupied settlement he stopped, in which building he spent the night, stole and committed crimes on our land."

"We know their cell phone numbers, the names of their parents, wives, children, their home addresses," who their neighbors are, where they went to school and the names of their teachers, he said.

Analysts caution that some claims about data collection from both sides of the conflict may be exaggerated. But in recordings posted online by Ukrainian Digital Transformation Minister Mikhailo Fedorov, callers are heard phoning the far-flung wives of Russian soldiers and posing as Russian state security officials to say parcels shipped to them from Belarus were looted from Ukrainian homes.

In one, a nervous-sounding woman acknowledges receiving what she calls souvenirs — a woman's bag, a keychain.

The caller tells her she shares criminal liability, that her husband "killed people in Ukraine and stole their stuff."

She hangs up.
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How Russians - and Ukranians - are Using Stolen Data More

How Russians - and Ukranians - are Using Stolen Data

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  • Hold the line (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Saturday April 30, 2022 @11:19AM (#62491860)
    The governments that abuse this new digital age will - it will end badly in the long run. Less motivation to work hard, think hard, play hard, fight hard. Why bother when your mind and body arent really your own. All the democratic countries need to do is simply hold the line, hold their values and the new dictators will suffer the same fate as the old ones. We dont have to beat them on the battlefield (unless they start a war. Lookin at you Russia). The best revenge is living well.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      That's assuming we keep electing non-dictators.
      Once you get a semi-competent Trump, it all goes downhill very quickly.

      • Re:Hold the line (Score:4, Insightful)

        by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Saturday April 30, 2022 @01:06PM (#62492108)
        Nixon was basically a fairly-competent Trump. The country survived it. By the second term, Nixon had lost support even from his own party. If Trump had won, he would be crashing and burning even worse. There would have been even more rounds of impeachments and his republican support would have cracked, cause his incompetence was getting REALLY obvious. We would have survived. But I’m glad the US voters corrected the situation after just 4 years.

    • That is a somewhat naive view that the west held about Putin. Treat him nice, let him join the circle of democratic leaders, don't push back when he commits atrocities since it's just a teen phase he'll outgrow. Only now they realize he's a literal monster. The message doesn't make it back to Russian citizens as their information is carefully curated, and those who do get information from outside are labeled as traitors, while opponents are arrested or poisoned. Standing by and doing nothing is how dict

      • I’m not suggesting we curl up and die. We defend our borders, and help defend like minded countries. Its the old strategy of containment. No need to conquer Russia or China. Just keep them from invading other places, which is (unfortunately) exactly what they want to do.

        • I’m not suggesting we curl up and die. We defend our borders, and help defend like minded countries. Its the old strategy of containment. No need to conquer Russia or China. Just keep them from invading other places, which is (unfortunately) exactly what they want to do.

          My question is, why would you make a comment like yours on an article which is exactly about the situation where what they did was exactly "they start a war"? Hitler's strategy was to start taking various weaker countries he could target more easily; to become stronger and then to attack the rest later. If Russia returns to it's borders, agrees to various serious peace treaties and protections against future action and pays restitution to Ukraine then I can see that it makes sense to stop any form of activ

      • Treat him nice, let him join the circle of democratic leaders, don't push back when he commits atrocities since it's just a teen phase he'll outgrow.

        It's not really about Putin outgrowing the phase. It's about the country outgrowing the phase where they support Putin. And all indications are that the country is outgrowing him (his biggest group of supporters is dying off, younger people heavily support democracy, for example).

        So sometimes the best thing to do is stand by and let the country mature on its own. Even today it's hard to get rid of Putin if we want to.

      • I have several Russian associates. Curation of their information isn't the problem. They're exposed to western news regularly. They simply don't believe it.
        I think it has something to do with Soviet mindsets, because I have a good German friend who grew up in East Germany who believes the same thing.

        Russia are the good guys, everything bad about them is US misinformation.
        Basically the direct opposite of all the US dumbfucks who think the US are the good guys, and anything bad about the US is misinformat

    • All governments spy. For a variety of reasons. Russia and Ukraine are at war, so, yes, even more so.

      Remember that USA & Israel attacked Iranian centrifuges with a virus when NOT at war, and we are talking damage to infrastructure here, so let's cut out the hypocrisy.

      • A virus?! lol.
        Israel invaded Iranian airspace, and dropped actual bombs on a nuclear reactor.
        They assassinate Iranian civilians.
        The US shot down one of their airliners, constantly violate their territorial waters.

        We define the evil of an action based on who it's done against.
        We then do the mental gymnastics necessary to justify it. It really is fucking disgusting.

  • The hacks, paired with prewar data theft, likely armed Russia with extensive details on much of Ukraine's population, ... It's information Russia can use to identify and locate Ukrainians most likely to resist an occupation, and potentially target them for internment or worse.

    "Fantastically useful information if you're planning an occupation," Jack Watling, a military analyst at the U.K. think tank Royal United Services Institute, said of the auto insurance data, "knowing exactly which car everyone drives and where they live and all that." ... information dominance is increasingly wielded for social control, ... It was no surprise to Ukrainian officials that a prewar priority for Russia would be compiling information on committed patriots. "The idea was to kill or imprison these people at the early stages of occupation," Victor Zhora, a senior Ukrainian cyber defense official, alleged....

    Such information is not just useful for post-invasion pacification. It's also useful during the invasion.

    Know the opposition is likely to come largely from civilian resistance volunteers and militiamen recruited or conscripted after the invasion starts? Know where those likely to be effective are concentrated? Not worried about committing "war crimes"? Why not use that information to plan your bombardments and invasion routes? Why wait for them to get organized, signed up, into uniform, moved to unknown locations? Just blow them up preemptively at home!

    This could explain the seemingly random civilian bombardment atrocities the Russian forces have been committing all through their attacks.

    It reminds me of a component of the U.S. Civil War: Sherman's "March to the Sea" through the (US, then Confederate) state of Georga. This scorched-earth march had the stated intent of debilitating the Confederate army's supply lines and the Confederacy's economy. It freed a lot of slaves, denying them much of their labor force. But it also destroyed most of the infrastructure of the state - houses, farms, factories, grain mills, stored grain and goods. About 20% of the goods were looted to supply the Union army, so it wasn't dependent on its own supply lines from the north. But the other 80% were destroyed, leaving the population hungry, homeless, and terrorized.

    The route was planned to do the maximum damage, using information from the immediately previous census.

    • It reminds me of a component of the U.S. Civil War: Sherman's "March to the Sea" through the (US, then Confederate) state of Georga. This scorched-earth march had the stated intent of debilitating the Confederate army's supply lines and the Confederacy's economy.

      I was thinking about Sharman's March in comparison to the war crimes in Ukraine. In some sense they are the same, both an attempt to discourage the population from waging war again in the future.

      In another sense, they are different. Whereas Sherman's target was actively engaging infrastructure, they didn't strategically target civilians. Russians do [cnn.com]. That is why they bring in the Kadyrovites, to scare the Ukrainian population. Terror is an official war strategy.

      • Both sides engage in terrorism [amnesty.org]. They have been since 2014. The perception to westerners that Ukrainians are the good guys is exactly the same as the Russian perception that Russians are the good guys.
        It's all fucking propaganda. The fact is, these people are very closely culturally and ethnically linked. In both cultures, they're used to terrorism and torture as regular tools of conflict.

        • Ukrainians might not be the "good guys", but the Russians are definitely the bad guys.

        • It's all fucking propaganda.

          There's plenty of this which is propaganda on both sides, however saying its "all propaganda" is really dangerous. The difference between the two sides is not so much where they are at, but a direction of travel.

          Ukraine has wanted to join the EU, has been in a process of bringing in the basics of human rights protection. When there have been videos of atrocities by the Ukrainian side, the reaction of the government has been that they will investigate. This is a war situation so it's not even close to a simp

          • There's plenty of this which is propaganda on both sides, however saying its "all propaganda" is really dangerous. The difference between the two sides is not so much where they are at, but a direction of travel.

            I agree that is a difference between them.

            Ukraine has wanted to join the EU, has been in a process of bringing in the basics of human rights protection. When there have been videos of atrocities by the Ukrainian side, the reaction of the government has been that they will investigate. This is a war situation so it's not even close to a simple direction of travel, but the will is there.

            Ukraine doesn't get a get-out-of-jail-free card because they're moving in the right direction, by some measures.
            The reaction of Ukraine to a neo-nazi paramilitary group murdering and torturing suspected separatists in Donbas was to arm them, and then give them official uniforms.

            Russia is going in the opposite direction. Having had some level of freedom they are now closing down free media. What minimal human rights they had are being destroyed as quickly as possible. Their reaction to the atrocities of Bucha has been to hand out medals to the perpetrators.

            This much is true.

            When you treat it as "just two sides" and say "they're all the same" you are not encouraging those that are changing and improving. You aren't rewarding those people on either side that are trying to improve things. There are Russians who don't approve of the evil being done in their name, even in the armed forces. Sometimes they have been reported to be punishing the rapists. If you don't recognise the difference in levels of evil you don't recognise the possibility for reform that might happen in future.

            It isn't my job to encourage Ukraine to behave like they're not Russia.
            I reward their good actions with my praise, and I call out their bad actions with my criticism.

            I s

            • Ukraine has wanted to join the EU, has been in a process of bringing in the basics of human rights protection. When there have been videos of atrocities by the Ukrainian side, the reaction of the government has been that they will investigate. This is a war situation so it's not even close to a simple direction of travel, but the will is there.

              Ukraine doesn't get a get-out-of-jail-free card because they're moving in the right direction, by some measures.

              I agree

              The reaction of Ukraine to a neo-nazi paramilitary group murdering and torturing suspected separatists in Donbas was to arm them, and then give them official uniforms.

              There's another way of putting that. Ukraine has brought the informal units into the normal chain of command which will enable better discipline in future. I think both of our statements are true and that this is problematic but that the current situation will have to be judged based on future response to any crimes that are committed now.

              It isn't my job to encourage Ukraine to behave like they're not Russia. / I reward their good actions with my praise, and I call out their bad actions with my criticism.

              In a sense, partly, because you are commenting on this and judging these people, it becomes your job. Ukrainian soldiers in general and the Azov battalion especiall

  • T'is but a copy.

  • I mean, you have to be REALLY stupid to not know what is going on when your husband is shipping you 'souvenirs' while he is in a war zone.

  • I hope this brings home the risk that comes from various leaks of data to China and Russia from various US and other companies. Even if they can't be used directly in an invasion of the US there are plenty of other opportunities for less direct usage. This whole idea that it's worth our security services keeping vulnerabilities to use as back doors becomes quite discredited if those same backdoors are used by people who actually qualify under the term "enemies".

    A real clear case where the security of comput

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