Monday, August 4, 2025
No Result
View All Result
News Den Nigeria
  • HOME
  • NEWS
    • NIGERIA
    • AFRICA
    • WORLD
  • POLITICS
  • BUSINESS
  • SHOWBIZ
  • EDUCATION
  • HEALTH
  • TECHNOLOGY
  • SPORTS
  • OPINION
  • MORE
    • FEATURES
    • INTERVIEWS
    • RELIGION
    • RELATIONSHIP
    • VIDEOS
  • HOME
  • NEWS
    • NIGERIA
    • AFRICA
    • WORLD
  • POLITICS
  • BUSINESS
  • SHOWBIZ
  • EDUCATION
  • HEALTH
  • TECHNOLOGY
  • SPORTS
  • OPINION
  • MORE
    • FEATURES
    • INTERVIEWS
    • RELIGION
    • RELATIONSHIP
    • VIDEOS
No Result
View All Result
News Den Nigeria
No Result
View All Result

How Hacking Became A Professional Service in Russia

by NewsDen Publishers
May 24, 2021
in FEATURES
0
How Hacking Became A Professional Service in Russia
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on WhatsappSend to Email

DARKSIDE’s most high-profile hacking operation may prove to be its last: in early May, the group launched a ransomware attack against the Colonial Pipeline Company, which provides as much as half the fuel supply for the East Coast of the United States. As the effects of the hack mounted, the company shut down the pipeline, and that led to a spike in the price of gasoline, as well as days of widespread fuel shortages. President Joe Biden declared a state of emergency. DarkSide reportedly walked away with a five-million-dollar ransom, but receiving the payout appears to have come at a cost. On May 14th, DarkSide’s site went down, and the group said that it has lost access to many of its communication and payment tools—as a result of either retaliation from the U.S. or a decision by the members who fund the organization to pull the plug themselves.

DarkSide is a so-called ransomware-as-a-service enterprise, meaning that it does not actually perform the labor of carrying out cyberattacks. Instead, it provides affiliated hackers with a range of services, from handling negotiations to processing payments. It had a blog and a user-friendly interface for hackers to upload and publish stolen information. When DarkSide débuted on Russian-language cybercrime forums, last August, its launch announcement sounded like a tech entrepreneur’s pitch deck. “We created DarkSide because we didn’t find the perfect product for us,” it read. “Now we have it.” It set out a sliding fee scale, ranging from twenty-five per cent of ransoms worth less than half a million dollars to ten per cent of those worth five million or more.

Ransomware as a service, like the modern tech economy as a whole, has evolved to account for a high degree of specialization, with each participant in the marketplace providing discrete skills. An operation such as DarkSide’s attack against Colonial Pipeline begins with an individual or team of hackers known as “individual access brokers,” who penetrate a target company’s network. From that point, another hacker moves laterally to the domain controller, the server in charge of security and user access, and installs the ransomware code there. (DarkSide, among its many services, has offered its own brand of malware for locking and extracting data.) Once a victim’s servers have been breached and its computer systems frozen, the hackers hand things over to the operators of a ransomware-as-a-service outfit, who manage everything else, including determining a ransom value, communicating with victim organizations, and arranging the particulars of payment. “That’s the stuff you, as a hacker, don’t want to deal with,” Mark Arena, the C.E.O. of Intel 471, a private cyberintelligence firm, said. “You don’t have the patience or the social skills.”

Maris School Admission Maris School Admission Maris School Admission
ADVERTISEMENT

On May 10th, Biden said U.S. intelligence believes that DarkSide is located in Russia, even if there is “no evidence” that links it to the Russian state. Like many revenue streams in the cybercrime underworld, ransomware as a service is largely, though not entirely, dominated by Russian-speaking hackers with roots in Russia and other former Soviet states. (There are plenty of exceptions, such as North Korea’s state-run hacking teams, who specialize in online bank theft.)

AlsoRead

Nigerian Hackers Arrested For ‘Sextortion’

The reasons for this situation go back to the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the nineteen-nineties, when highly competent engineers, programmers, and technicians were suddenly left adrift. Decades later, the story hasn’t changed much: younger generations of Russians have access to specialized educations in physics, computer science, and mathematics, but have few outlets to realize those talents, at least not for the kinds of salaries available to programmers in, say, Silicon Valley. “And what do they see when they go online? That it’s possible with their knowledge and skills to earn millions of dollars, just like that,” Sergey Golovanov, the chief security expert at Kaspersky Lab, a cybersecurity company based in Moscow, said. “A certain percentage of these people decide it’s worth breaking the law.”

Such a career can look all the more attractive given that the risks seem rather small, at least if you focus on Western targets. Although Russian law-enforcement bodies periodically mount operations aimed at domestic cybercriminals, they generally turn a blind eye to those who use Russia as a base for infiltrating foreign networks. That is partly a function of legal jurisdiction and investigative wherewithal. If there’s no victim on Russian territory who can show up in person to file a police report and offer evidence for a criminal trial, then there isn’t much for the authorities to pursue. “Even if Russia law enforcement was so inclined, there would be nothing to investigate,” Alexey Lukatsky, a noted cybersecurity consultant in Moscow, said.

To insure that they don’t run into trouble on their home turf, most ransomware-as-a-service sites prohibit the targeting of companies or institutions in Russia or within the territory of the former Soviet Union. “Hackers have a rule: don’t work on the .ru domain,” Golovanov said. In DarkSide’s case, part of its malware code scanned for languages installed on the target workstation; if it detected Russian or another language common to post-Soviet countries, it did not deploy, and erased itself from the machine.

But there is also one further, very important reason why cybercriminals may feel relatively free to operate from inside of Russia. Russia’s security services are tempted to see hackers who target Western corporations, governments, and individuals less as a threat than as a resource. In 2014, the F.B.I. indicted a Russian hacker named Evgeniy Bogachev on charges of allegedly stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from bank accounts across the globe; American prosecutors asked their Russian counterparts for coöperation. Rather than arrest Bogachev, however, Russian authorities used his breaches to hunt for files and e-mails on devices belonging to government employees and contractors in the United States, Georgia, and Turkey. As the Times wrote, the Russian state was, in effect, “grafting an intelligence operation onto a far-reaching cybercriminal scheme, sparing themselves the hard work of hacking into the computers themselves.”

In a 2012 policy paper titled “Beyond Attribution,” Jason Healey, the director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, proposed assessing state responsibility in hacking attacks on a continuum ranging from “state-prohibited” to “state-integrated.” It is unclear exactly where the DarkSide attack against Colonial Pipeline falls on that line, or what Biden meant when he said that Russia “bears some responsibility to deal with this.” So far, the publicly available evidence suggests a categorization, in Healey’s taxonomy, of “state-ignored,” in which a “national government knows about the third-party attacks but, as a matter of policy, is unwilling to take any official action.”

 

The New Yorker

ShareTweetSendSend
Previous Post

Okowa Says Ranching Is An Alternative To Open Grazing

Next Post

Gunmen Attack INEC Office, Police Division

Related Posts

Weight Loss Drugs Can Boost Testosterone In Men, Study Finds
FEATURES

Weight Loss Drugs Can Boost Testosterone In Men, Study Finds

by NewsDen Publishers
July 15, 2025
Call to bar: The unstoppable journey of 5 IDPs 
EDUCATION

Call to bar: The unstoppable journey of 5 IDPs 

by NewsDen Publishers
July 15, 2025
Oborevwori/Onyeme: Building Bridges Of Unity Beyond Delta
FEATURES

Oborevwori/Onyeme: Building Bridges Of Unity Beyond Delta

by NewsDen Publishers
July 7, 2025
Mossad Spy Who Crippled Iran From Within
FEATURES

Mossad Spy Who Crippled Iran From Within

by NewsDen Publishers
July 2, 2025
Health Benefits Of African Butter Pear, Ube Or Safou
FEATURES

Health Benefits Of African Butter Pear, Ube Or Safou

by NewsDen Publishers
June 30, 2025
Next Post
Gunmen Attack INEC Office, Police Division

Gunmen Attack INEC Office, Police Division

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.

LATEST

Ndokwa Reporters at 12: Bel Media Launches BEL DIALOGUE to Deepen Civic Engagement

Ndokwa Reporters at 12: Bel Media Launches BEL DIALOGUE to Deepen Civic Engagement

August 3, 2025
Presidency To Host Digital Media Summit

Presidency To Host Digital Media Summit

July 30, 2025
Future of NIS lies in reforms, robust public-private partnership, says Shaibu

Future of NIS lies in reforms, robust public-private partnership, says Shaibu

July 30, 2025
Ejakpovi Lauds Mark’s Emergence As ADC Chairman

Ejakpovi Lauds Mark’s Emergence As ADC Chairman

July 30, 2025
FOI violations: IPC seeks sanctions’ revisit for public officials

FOI violations: IPC seeks sanctions’ revisit for public officials

July 28, 2025

TRENDING STORIES

  • Flood: I Am Committed To Addressing Developmental Needs Of Our Communities, Says Oborevwori

    Flood: I Am Committed To Addressing Developmental Needs Of Our Communities, Says Oborevwori

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Delta Govt Approves Establishment Of Rural Electricity Agency

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Okey Ofili Is A Role Model, Says Oborevwori

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • 2027 Presidency: APC Chieftain, Ndubuka Lauds Tinubu’s Endorsement

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Monday Onyeme Foundation Releases Guidelines For 2025 Prospective Scholarship Beneficiaries

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • I No Longer Search for Job -YAGEPreneur Ocheli

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • God Still Answers Prayers, Says Fr. Mozia

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Okowa Mourns Tuwere Utuama

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • About Charles Aniagwu Who Will Discuss Local Governance And Sustainable Devt At Maris Lecture 2025

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • US Bombs Iran

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • HOME
  • ABOUT US
  • CONTACT US

© NEWS DEN Since 2020 - Published by: GOLDSON'S RESOURCES.

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • NEWS
    • NIGERIA
    • AFRICA
    • WORLD
  • POLITICS
  • SHOWBIZ
  • EDUCATION
  • BUSINESS
  • HEALTH
  • TECHNOLOGY
  • SPORTS
  • OPINION
  • MORE
    • FEATURES
    • INTERVIEWS
    • RELIGION
    • RELATIONSHIP
    • VIDEOS

© NEWS DEN Since 2020 - Published by: GOLDSON'S RESOURCES.