In 2007,
"Estonia says the country's websites have been under heavy attack for the past three weeks, blaming Russia for playing a part in the cyber warfare.
Many of the attacks have come from Russia and are being hosted by Russian state computer servers, Tallinn says. Moscow denies any involvement." (BBC News : Thursday, 17 May 2007) (my emphasis)
And on December 23, 2015,
"Experts say they have established the world’s first known case of a
cyber attack on a power grid, which cut power to more than 600,000 homes
in Ukraine in late December. US intelligence agencies and cyber
security experts are looking to Russia as the likely source of the
attack.....
.........
It’s a scenario that has long worried cyber security experts. “It’s a milestone because we’ve definitely seen targeted destructive events against energy before—oil firms, for instance—but never the event which causes the blackout,” John Hultquist, director of cyber espionage analysis at iSIGHT told Ars Technica." (Quartz :
Robert Lipovsky and Anton Cherepanov give us a detailed insight into the nature of this cyber attack.
They explain that,
"... The BlackEnergy backdoor, as well as a recently discovered SSH backdoor, themselves provide attackers with remote access to infected systems. After having successfully infiltrated a critical system with either of these trojans, an attacker would, again theoretically, be perfectly capable of shutting it down. In such case, the planted KillDisk destructive trojan would act as a means of making recovery more difficult." (welivesecurity : 4 Jan 2016) (my emphasis)
As in the case of the cyber attack on Estonia in 2007, Putin is once again hiding behind the skirts of "so-called" hackers, in the hope that the international community will not see him as the instigator of this cyber warfare against Ukraine.
Many commentators seem to be tip-toeing around pointing the finger directly at Putin.
Yet as recently as December 21, Paul Baldwin informed us that,
An explosion ripped through a natural gas pipeline in western Ukraine's Transcarpathian region on Friday, January 1st (2016)." (UT : Jan. 1, 2016) (my emphasis)
What signal can Putin be sending to Ukraine by blowing up a natural gas pipeline that sends the gas of Gazprom to the EU, where it earns much needed cash for a Russian economy that is nose-diving into a near complete collapse?
As Ted Meyer writes,
"While the continued free fall of oil prices has contributed in part to another year of growth for the United States economy, the picture is much less rosy in Russia. With an economy that is highly dependent on oil and gas exports, the shrinking oil prices have hit Russia hard...
..... in November the Russian GDP shrank after a few months of incremental growth. All of this bad news begs a question: is Russia’s economy headed for collapse in 2016?" (Investopedia :
Putin, it would seem, has a political and economic timebomb ticking beneath him. Attacking the Ukrainian electricity grid will simply not stop that bomb ticking down.
(to be continued)
"Estonia says the country's websites have been under heavy attack for the past three weeks, blaming Russia for playing a part in the cyber warfare.Many of the attacks have come from Russia and are being hosted by Russian state computer servers, Tallinn says. Moscow denies any involvement." (BBC News : Thursday, 17 May 2007) (my emphasis)
And on December 23, 2015,
"Experts say they have established the world’s first known case of a
cyber attack on a power grid, which cut power to more than 600,000 homes
in Ukraine in late December. US intelligence agencies and cyber
security experts are looking to Russia as the likely source of the
attack..............
It’s a scenario that has long worried cyber security experts. “It’s a milestone because we’ve definitely seen targeted destructive events against energy before—oil firms, for instance—but never the event which causes the blackout,” John Hultquist, director of cyber espionage analysis at iSIGHT told Ars Technica." (Quartz :
Robert Lipovsky and Anton Cherepanov give us a detailed insight into the nature of this cyber attack.
They explain that,
"... The BlackEnergy backdoor, as well as a recently discovered SSH backdoor, themselves provide attackers with remote access to infected systems. After having successfully infiltrated a critical system with either of these trojans, an attacker would, again theoretically, be perfectly capable of shutting it down. In such case, the planted KillDisk destructive trojan would act as a means of making recovery more difficult." (welivesecurity : 4 Jan 2016) (my emphasis)
As in the case of the cyber attack on Estonia in 2007, Putin is once again hiding behind the skirts of "so-called" hackers, in the hope that the international community will not see him as the instigator of this cyber warfare against Ukraine.Many commentators seem to be tip-toeing around pointing the finger directly at Putin.
Yet as recently as December 21, Paul Baldwin informed us that,
"Speaking on a documentary broadcast on Russian TV, Putin said he would not wield the "nuclear big stick".
But
he threatened to liquidate Islamic State jihadis with nuclear warheads
if conventional bombing raids fail to destroy the terror group.
The Russian president warned that his military's cruise missiles could be fitted with atomic weapons." (Daily Express : Mon, Dec 21, 2015)
An explosion ripped through a natural gas pipeline in western Ukraine's Transcarpathian region on Friday, January 1st (2016)." (UT : Jan. 1, 2016) (my emphasis)
What signal can Putin be sending to Ukraine by blowing up a natural gas pipeline that sends the gas of Gazprom to the EU, where it earns much needed cash for a Russian economy that is nose-diving into a near complete collapse?
As Ted Meyer writes,
"While the continued free fall of oil prices has contributed in part to another year of growth for the United States economy, the picture is much less rosy in Russia. With an economy that is highly dependent on oil and gas exports, the shrinking oil prices have hit Russia hard...
..... in November the Russian GDP shrank after a few months of incremental growth. All of this bad news begs a question: is Russia’s economy headed for collapse in 2016?" (Investopedia :
Putin, it would seem, has a political and economic timebomb ticking beneath him. Attacking the Ukrainian electricity grid will simply not stop that bomb ticking down.
(to be continued)
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