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Opinion
July 7, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 25
STOLYPIN: Russia’s cyber-challenge cuts both ways
Mark Galeotti of the Institute of International Relations Prague
Russia is firmly established in the popular imagi- nation as the hacker superpower (even if this is only partly true), and some in Moscow even seem to relish this. However, as last week’s notPetya in- cident demonstrated, the Russians actually ought to be less comfortable about a brave new world of weaponised hacks and viruses.
As Russia’s guerrilla geopoliticians look for asym- metric ways of undermining their supposed rivals in the West, hacking seems to be a cheap, easy and effective instrument. From breaking into US Democrats’ emails to launching massive DDOS attacks (crashing systems with deluges of queries) on Estonia in 2007, Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine periodically but especially from 2014, this has indeed become a central instrument of Russian political war. It may not always have the intended effect – Moscow probably did not anticipate Don- ald Trump’s election, and its attempt to discredit France’s Emmanuel Macron with doctored leaks backfired – but it has certainly kept Russia in the headlines. For a Kremlin desperate to affirm that Russia matters in the world, it is tempting to sus- pect that no news is bad news.
The first reason why Moscow may want to think again is reputational. When notPetya first started ravaging Ukraine’s computer infrastructure, Kyiv blamed Moscow. To a considerable degree this was without any real evidence, just the flimsy basis that Russia undoubtedly hacks Ukraine frequently and that this was “clearly” timed to coincide with the country’s Constitution Day. This
was, however, really a knee-jerk response – pretty much everything which goes wrong in Ukraine ends up blamed on Russian President Vladimir Putin somehow, it seems – but nonetheless it received a more receptive audience than it might, precisely because Russia does do this kind of thing.
Ironically, evidence would later begin to emerge suggesting a Russian dimension, although it is not yet possible to say whether it was a government initiative or carried out by self-tasking “patriotic hackers”. The fact that it specifically targeted the M. E. Doc accounting software adopted to replace the Russian-standard 1C package, banned by Kyiv, and that the apparent demand for ransoms ap- pears to have been a masquerade, does suggest Ukraine was a specific target, and that the intent was disruption and not financial gain.
Nonetheless, Moscow now finds itself in a situa- tion in which it is often blamed ahead of any proof, and regardless of whether that proof ever ap- pears.
The second reason is practical. It is noteworthy that, having started by blazing through Ukraine’s systems, notPetya also spread into Russia, hitting Rosneft and Evraz, probably through their Ukrain- ian affiliates.
Russia has historically been less affected by mali- cious hacks and virtual crimes than comparable countries. In part, this reflects the informal under-