Slashdot Mirror
Cyber Firms Warn on Suspected Russian Plan To Attack Ukraine (reuters.com)
Jim Finkle, reporting for Reuters: Cisco Systems on Wednesday warned that hackers have infected at least 500,000 routers and storage devices in dozens of countries with highly sophisticated malicious software, possibly in preparation for another massive cyber attack on Ukraine. Cisco's Talos cyber intelligence unit said it has high confidence that the Russian government is behind the campaign, dubbed VPNFilter, because the hacking software shares code with malware used in previous cyber attacks that the U.S. government has attributed to Moscow. Cisco said the malware could be used for espionage, to interfere with internet communications or launch destructive attacks on Ukraine, which has previously blamed Russia for massive hacks that took out parts of its energy grid and shuttered factories. Head of Ukraine's cyber police said on Wednesday that the agency is aware of new large malware campaign, and that it is working to protect Ukraine against possible new cyber threat.
At what point can we just sever as much internet traffic out of Russia to the world? I know I'm massively oversimplifying that effort, but should there not be some sort of 'death penalty' against countries engaging in cyber warfare? China and some other smaller nations would likely keep connections which would make it hard to filter between Russian and Chinese communications, but any directly from Russia could be subject to either massive slowdown or complete blocking.