Hackers Tied to Russia's GRU Targeted the US Grid for Years, Researchers Warn | Hacker News Reader

Hackers Tied to Russia's GRU Targeted the US Grid for Years, Researchers Warn

wired.com

32 pointslxm13 comments

Is it another try to represent Russians as "bad" (in context of Texas tragedy)? Really tired of it.

It's nice to imagine there's a distinction between the GRU and Russia writ large. Particularly since the typical Russian citizen has no say over what the GRU does.

Also, there are easy explanations at hand for the extended outages in Texas that have nothing to do with hacking the power grid. Now if we're talking about the Ukrainian power grid...

It really has nothing to do with the Russian people, it has to do with the Russian government and its agencies. I don't think anyone but you is conflating the two here.

Unfortunately, the Russians have a very long history of bad rulers. These rules were constantly fighting with enemies outside and inside. Common people were suffering because of this, century after century. They were rebelling, time after time, and finally one of these rebellions succeeded, and the last Tzar was killed. Unfortunately, it turned out the new leaders are not any better, and again millions of Russians died.

So whenever someone conflates Russian rulers with Russian themselves, I feel really bad about it. Russian people are in no way different from any other nation, they are nice and friendy. If anything, I'd say they have several smart people and scientists vritually unkonwn in the West, which is a pity to both sides.

No it's just yet another piece of coverage in the decade long coverage of russia hacking everything

I wonder what the long game of this is. If an attacker does too much damage (like disabling NYC or Chicago financial centers), they cause significant financial disruptions globally - some of which will negatively affect people close to the attackers.

If an actual armed conflict arose, then I could see how it might be useful. But an armed conflict between those two countries would be highly destabilizing, meaning it would create a lot of financial risk to people with big financial interests. So in other words, it's probably not worth doing.

Sounds like an effective deterrent to keep your adversaries at bay in a variety of situations.

This assumes the story is even true. If it doesn't seem like a rational thing to do under the pretence of it being true, then shouldn't you assume it's false?

You still do war planning even if you don't want to go to war. We still keep our better nuclear deterrent up and running, even though literally no one wants a nuclear war.

>says Dragos vice president of threat intelligence and former NSA analyst Sergio Caltagirone.

I put as much faith in him as I do in a former GRU analyst making claims about the CIA.

how do they know they are russian?

their proxy IP is from russia?

This is simple conspiracy theory run amok about Russian fear mongering. There’s no proof about anything stated in the article, just some guy spreading rumors around.

China communist party has actual people spying on all levels of government, business, tech, academia, etc on a large scale. Documented cases of China communist spies caught red handed. Those are just outright criminal spying on US.

There are also mass disinformation and propaganda campaign run by China communist party state run media and tech companies. They run bot operations in all US social media. They run pro China communist party opeds in Establishment media.

Where are the non stop outrage about uighars, Hong Kong, Tibet, Tiananmen Square, Chinese slaves making Apple iPhones, China colonizing Africa? The active suppression campaign is on full force to suppress discussion of any negative stories on China behavior.

Well, one distinction is that the victims of Chinese activity, aside from IP theft, are largely Chinese or Taiwanese citizens. There is plenty of outrage about the Uighurs, Hong Kong, Tibet, and so forth, but it has a different tenor. The GRU has attacked sovereign nations quite spectacularly -- the Ukrainian power grid and the US election in 2016 -- and less spectacularly, but still pretty disturbingly -- the German power grid. China is taking aggressive actions in the South China Sea. Russia has actually invaded a neighboring country and one of its missiles has shot down a Dutch airliner. Plus Russian military intelligence does a lot of assassinating more or less right out in the open, albeit the victims are always Russians except when they're especially sloppy. So you can understand how the news coverage is a little different. It's a matter of the sense of immediate threat to the people outraged.

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