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Comment by cheeze | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's just me but these seem rather... tame?

Phishing campaigns? I'd assume those happen year round, war or not.

Am I wrong here? Missing something?

(Author here) Yeah. Much of this activity is pretty consistent with what TAG generally sees in the region and from these actors.

Don’t think I could ever be a hacker because phishing folks doesn’t sound exciting at all

If you think that sounds bad, you should see how most of the peacetime military spends its time.

or diplomatic negotiations where people just talk past each other delivering pre-written speeches repeatedly like someone is going to hear something new the 3rd time you read the speech.

Its not one person, these are groups of people who likely have a single strength in a particular area. the guy who is good at hacking, is the guy sending phsining emails isnt the guy setting up the bank accounts.

My novice POV is that you would expect russians to have a higher ratio of hackers to script kiddies as opposed to a country like Ghana who scams just as many that is mostly just script kiddies trading techniques on underground markets.

A recent Science Friday segment observed that there's been less big cyber than expected so far https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/cyber-warfare-russia-...

> Missing something?

From what I've seen on OSINT Twitter, I think what you're missing is that Russia is not actually all that good at cyberwarfare in terms of hacking high security systems, or even securing their own systems. There was a story today about a high ranking general who was killed and it was picked up by the OSINT community due to Russians using unencrypted phones to communicate on the battlefield. Extremely rookie mistake. Russia's cyberwarfare strengths seem to end with simple DDoS attacks and propaganda bot nets on social networks.

At the same time, there's a difference between cyberwarefare strengths and operational security being practiced (or not) by the soldiers in the field. It only takes one person to break protcol and pull out an unsecure device. Or it could be done on purpose as a bit of plausible deniability of sabatoge.

There's a bunch of reasons I can think of than just Russia is weak about secure comms.

One weak link and the whole chain is weak.

It's an insecure protocol rather than a device. If they'd used an encrypted VOIP app it would literally be secure, but they banned those out of paranoia and weren't able to provide their own replacements.

I think the actual intercept was real intelligence tapping the cell phone network and OSINT accounts just repeated it, but not sure.

Since Google doesn't really own much infrastructure outside of the US, I don't think Google can do much, and maybe doesn't even have that much insight on what is going through the pipes elsewhere.

There is a lot more things happening that just phishing attacks though, from both sides. While Russia is attacking Ukrainian IT-infrastructure, Russian IT-infrastructure is getting hit by every other country at the moment.

>and maybe doesn't even have that much insight on what is going through the pipes elsewhere.

Chrome and their DNS can be used for that.

> Since Google doesn't really own much infrastructure outside of the US

What is that claim based on? I think they have alot of presence here in Europe. I doubt it would be economically to transfer too much data over the atlantic. Think of every Youtube video that is being watched. However, for services requiring central storage longer like e.g. email, I have no idea. I am not sure whether mailboxes have a home region.

Disclaimer: No insider knowledge here. Just what Iremember from tracouting years ago and trying to apply some common sense.

https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure has maps of Google CDN infrastructure.

(work at Google, and on the CDN)

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