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Russian Cyberspies Targeted MH17 Crash Investigation (trendmicro.com)
itwbennett writes: Security researchers from Trend Micro have found evidence that the Pawn Storm cyberespionage group set up rogue VPN and SFTP servers to target Dutch Safety Board employees before and after the report on the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) was finalized. It is likely that the rogue servers were set up with the goal of phishing login credentials from people involved in the MH17 crash investigation in order to obtain access to confidential information, the researchers said.
First Post not from Saint Petersburg.
Government employees should be mandated under penalty of death to implement and use certificate-based authentication with a password instead of passwords alone.
Maybe the US and Europe should look into developing a program like that.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
For a country that shot a passenger airliner to begin with — and not for the first time — for such a country to attempt to affect the investigation of the crime is no surprise at all. What may be surprising, is that none of the Dutch officials involved were killed or blackmailed. But it ain't over yet, is it?..
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
the russian scum trying to cover up the obvious.
What confidential information ?
What could the commission be hiding that could possibly be useful to the Russians, and at the same should not be out in the open anyway ?
oh my comment got deleted because it spoke the truth. i guess ./ is owned by rasputin.
russian scum trying to cover things up and sabotage the investigation nothing new. the only truth is what they say it is.
the investigation investigates the investigators.
Internal propaganda keeps telling to the Russian audience of 150 million people that Russia does not participate, and that all the weapons, heavy flamethrowers, drones and tanks, are merely bought at military surplus stores.
Entire story would just collapse.
Russia does have a history of keeping the parallel history and making it official.
I don't understand how these Russian Cyberspies are so careless as to leave a trail all the way back to Moscow.
Equation: The Death Star of Malware Galaxy
Why fly over a war zone, and one where bombing raids are taking place at that?
It would have been easy to read the news and avoid the place, at the cost of some thousands euros of fuel.
The wider area at large is known for missile/space launch industry, too.
Let's put the political stuff aside for a moment and look at the technical side. How did the attackers operate? A fake mail/vpn server? How is that supposed to work?
Or are we talking about standard script kiddie attacks (seeen by every site on the web) interpreted by Trend Micro as Russian government attacks? Let's not forget that this is a great commercial message for Trend Micro. Is this stuff for real or is someone trying to scare us?
Obviously there are lots of Russian hackers/script kiddies who are angry enough at the west to start something like this on their own. No real need for a big Russian government conspiracy.
(Never thought I'd be defending Poetin some day. You owe me one Vladimir!)
There are so many portable SAM missiles out there in the wild, that it makes sense to use an active protection system on civil aircrafts too.
For example, an IR-decoy flares system. It is small and relatively cheap.
The ejection seats would also be useful. In case of an Air France crash into the ocean when the airplane just stalled and fell down from the sky, it would save hundreds of passengers.
Civil Aircraft construction industry is stagnating. It has completely bureaucratized and politicized. There are so many innovations in the aeronautics, and they cannot even find fallen aircraft for years.
Just shit a little more on the world and then wait and see what the outcome will be.
I hear America has been excremented on quite thoroughly, so the day of reckoning is probably close...
Mummy, the Russians engage in the same shit (differentl flavour) as GWB, Booohooo !.
How many millions were just recently killed, maimed or ethnically cleansed by U.S. sponsored wars ? Who created ISIS ? Who sucks America's balls all the time in Den Hague ?
Compared to that, Russia's sins are miniscule.
Russia stands up to the banksters and to the U.S. weapons industry+mercenaries.
Long live Russia !
->Look it up.
New York wants Ukraine and Russia for exploitation. Now they need to whip up the sheeple so that they will die for Banksters.
So they will whine for extended periods about those "poor innocent dutchmen", will not call it "collateral damage" as the Americans always do. And surely they will not talk about who sponsored the coup d'etat in Kiev in the first place. They will gloss over the massacre of Russians in Kiev.
Well, hypocrites - Russia serves you the bill. Ask Mssrs Hitler and Napoleon for the cost of treating Russians as Untermenschen.
And if you do not stop, the payment will be collected somewhere wholly different and on a wholly different scale, banksters.
Countermeasures have been used since Vietnam. This was a radar guided missile and you won't deflect that with flares. Chaff and jamming *might* help, but sure as hell Almaz Antey have thought about simple countermeasures and they are probably entirely useless.
So classified jammers and heavy chaff dispensers mounted on all civil airliners ? That is a no-no from military and financial POVs.
The only way to avoid events like this is to route aircraft around any known air war zones. Plus big safety distance. Why was Kiev to f***ing incompetent ? Why were the EU so f***ing incompetent to not notice they shot down several aircraft in this region just days before ?
Kiev tried to slaughter Russians will essentially all planes in their inventory. Little wonder the Russians rolled SAMs out of the garage to put an end to this. Russia invented the concept of "dominate air from ground". Ask warmonger McCain, he knows from experience.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) is the Tonkins Gulf incident of Eurasia, except thsi time something DID happen, but the attribution is fake. Read the headlines, read the incessant drumbeat against Russia. This is being used to whip the US into approviing some military interventionism in the Ukraine.
It's total bullshit. Just like the US, Russia has tons of their weapons in the hands of people they do not directly control every action of. So we really have no hope of finding out who fired that missile and if they did, if they intended to target the plane; the "why" is mysteriously left out of all stories presented to you by the MSM. It's presented as a whodunit, meant to draw you in without triggering your critical thinking.
The Ukranians basically hate each ther for deep cultural, political and ethnic reasons. What needs to happen there is the nation needs to be divided between east and west but fairly, perhaps with one-of-a-kind critical things like ports and other natural resources being shared / accessible to all.
Russia has far far far greater interest in what happens there and is in it for the long haul. America is being driven by hegemonic power lust and behind that are a variety of power players who are looking to make a buck by 1) strting a conflict from which they profit directly 2) gaining control over natural resources.
Just like in Afghanistan then Iraq, the basic dynamic is- the people who live there aren't going anywhere, so how long would YOU like to stay here and keep things the way you like them, America? Because if your answer is anything other than "forever" rest assured things will eventually go in some way you're not going to like.
We'd have a lot more rela power in the world if we went in big on critical things and 8sought to work out equitable compromises elsewhere*.
But we don't do that because the US foreign policy is a tool of multinational corporations, the defence industry, individuals with a distorted and paranoiac world view who are deeply embedded in the national security complex and politicians who never tire of being seen as *tough* and who need an ever changing rolodex of "dangerous enemies" to justify their interventionsim.
For the last category- please let em help yo fill that rolodex with REAL worries.
Our infrastrcuture- water, electrcity, sewer systems are critically even insanely vulnerable to terrorism and a plausibly big attack on them would kill tens of thousands even millions. Feel free to start fixing that anytime.
The advancing state of civilian technology is leading us directly into a world where just anyone or a few people can kill people by the tens of thousands or millions. We're talking civilian access and ability to alter the DNA of organisms and even viruses. We're talking about synthetic biology. We're talking about the force multiplier for evil a poorly done IoT will subject us to.
We haver a lot more in common (to lose) with established nation-states like Russia than we have differences. We should be working WITH them, not trying to decide what goes down in their backyard. Would we let them decide what happens in Mexico? In Nicaragua or Chile or Argentina.. oh wait.. we already know the ansers tothose questions.
What -exactly- is the US afraid Russia is going to do to us? If the answer is "prevent a small gorup of billionaires like the members of the Blackstone Group fropm conrtolling more of the world's resources" then, yeah, that's not actually a national security concern.
Does anyone have a theory on what strategic purpose Russia and Putin may be said to have had in shooting down this flight which coud not have been achievedina "better" (quieter say) way?
This doesn't pass the smell test.
I am so amazed at the assumption.
The US rolled up all of the data that would tell us more, and has not released it. There are a ton of radar tapes covering that part of the world, the US had a spy satellite right over that spot when the shootdown occurred, has released exactly zero percent of the data that would prove Russian responsibility, and the story is firmly on ephemerals like this.
Likewise, notice that the US is careful not to directly charge the Russians with responsibility, because that would force the Russians to release their tapes showing what really happened. That is likely some of the leverage the Russians are using to stop the US in Eastern Europe and Syria.
Everyone gets focused on the obvious, and the obviously-missing data is easily forgotten in our mass-media age.
Slashdot is supposed to be the smartest of us.