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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.
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.
Because random untrained individuals can operate a SAM site?
Since when does the US give SAM sites to random rebel groups? The US doesn't even give (and actively blocks attempts to give) even groups it supports MANPADs, let alone SAM sites. The latter poses a vastly greater threat to commercial airliners - MANPADs can only hit them shortly after takeoff or shortly before landing, while SAM sites can hit them during cruise phase. They're also far more complicated systems and require a lot more training.
So peacetime accidents are equivalent to pumping military hardware and troops into a neighboring country to try to rip off part of it and shooting at anything that flies without warning civil aviation that you're supplying hardware that can shoot their planes down? And FYI, Russia initially tried to hide the fact that Ukraine had accidentally shot down Siberia Airlines Flight 1812, because they were actively propping up Ukraine's then government, claiming that it was impossible for the S200 to overshoot by 250 kilometers. And in the former case the US military made 10 attempts to hail Flight 655, three of which it received, and none of which it responded to.
In the former case, Ukraine initially denied its culpability, but later admitted it. In the latter case, the US admitted its involvement pretty much immediately. Russia to this date continues to deny, obfuscate, and apparently, hack too to try to avoid culpability.
Oh yes, the US clearly cares so tremendously much for Ukraine - that's why they won't even toss them a single Javelin, let alone heavy hardware, to help them defend their country, right? Clearly Russia had no choice but to flood the country with troops and vast amounts of heavy military hardware!
"Oh, goodness. Look at my wrist, I have to go." "But what about your clothes?" "I don't love these."
BUK is a surface to air system. It's mobile (vehicle mounted) rather than fixed, but that's usually the case these days. What it isn't is a MANPAD.
The US stopped giving anti-air missiles to rebel groups after the late 80s, after proliferation concerns were raised about the Stingers in Afghanistan. Nowadays the US on a rather anti-MANPAD crusade, including a MANPAD buyback program that buys MANPADs from anywhere, no questions asked, spending a small fortune ($40M/year) to try to get them off the black market.
Honestly, I think the US has gone a bit overboard in its anti-MANPAD obsession. They let Syria get flooded with TOWs in batches of 250-500 with a potential supply of over 13.000 (the amount that they sold to Saudi Arabia for that purpose), but finds the concept of a single MANPAD - which requires that you smuggle it to near the airport if you want to hit a commercial plane - unthinkable. A TOW can of course take out a passenger train, a truck carrying hazardous waste, attack nuclear facilities, hit a plane on the ground, etc. But the US has this weird distinction of "MANPADs = Unthinkable, Antitank = Use as many as you need". That's not to say that the TOWs are unrestricted - they have a pretty good policy for their distribution, requiring returning the spent tubes and filming the attacks and a bunch of other things; of the thousands that have been sent only 2-4 are believed to have been captured by al-Nusra, who's already used some if not all of them. But still...
And with the anti-MANPAD crusade, you'd think that they'd have poured more money into anti-proliferation countermeasures. Yet you don't see that hardly at all. In fact, it looks like the next version of the Grom is going to be the first anti-proliferation MANPAD, and that's Polish. And sometimes people talk about "ways anti-proliferation measures could be cheated", but these arguments are usually based around really dumb implementations of anti-proliferation measures. They don't have to be limited to electronic lockout mechanisms, you can have the missiles additionally be literally designed to degrade, with a "guaranteed to still work" time of X months and a "guaranteed to not work" time of Y months. Degradation isn't some unusual thing, it's much harder to *stop* than to cause. Replace for example gold interconnects on the circuitboards with sulfrous silver, or even calcium metal. Great conductor in the beginning, but it'll oxidize fast, especially if moist. Seal it in a casing with silica gel to slow the rate of decay to the desired length. Anyone opening the casing would only make it degrade even faster. Have the explosives and propellant similarly degrade so that for X months they're still fine, but after Y months they're no longer useful. You could even have the casing rust - and probably save yourself money in the process.
You can easily make it to the point where it'd be far, far easier to make a new MANPAD than to fix the degrading one.
"Oh, goodness. Look at my wrist, I have to go." "But what about your clothes?" "I don't love these."