Inside the Dark World Accelerating Russia's Economic Downturn

Hacker efforts are increasingly hurting the Russian economy and undermining Putin's military efforts. Photo: ALEXANDER KAZAKOV/SPUTNIK/KREMLIN POOL/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Russian citizens were shocked last month when a broadcast by Vladimir Putin surfaced in which the president declared martial law and announced that Ukrainian troops had invaded the country.

“Ukrainian troops armed to the teeth by NATO, with the consent and support of Washington, invaded Kursk, Belgorod and Bryansk,” the president said in an address broadcast on a number of radio stations and television channels. .

However, this announcement was a hoax based on artificial intelligence technology.

The hackers used computer algorithms to create an image of Putin, and even lip-synced his lips and voice to broadcast a false message.

Once infiltrating Russia's heavily censored state media to spread fake news using Putin's image would be unthinkable. .

Russians became alarmed in June when Vladimir Putin announced a general mobilization on air with a deepfake

However, cyberattacks against Russian infrastructure have increased over the past 18 months.

RZD said last week that hackers had penetrated their ticketing systems in a «massive» attack, RIA Novosti news feed reported.< /p>

The state-owned railway operator's website and mobile app went down, which the company blamed on «multiple attacks with ever-changing vectors and tools» originating «from all over the world».

This was not the only large-scale cyber incident in Russia in recent months. In June, the nation's interbank payment system briefly went down, disrupting the flow of money between its financial institutions.

A group of Ukraine-linked hackers claimed responsibility for shutting down the Bank of Russia telecom operator, preventing the central bank from digitally connections with the outside world.

In April, another attack disabled the IT systems of the Federal Customs Service, forcing inspectors back to pen and paper.

While they may seem minor in themselves, these attacks contribute to Russia's ongoing economic crisis .

The OECD estimates that Putin's war economy will contract by 2.5% this year in a worst-case scenario, reducing about $56bn (£43bn) of its gross domestic product.

Alan Woodward, a security expert at the University of Surrey, points to the exuberant community of Russian Telegram bloggers who chronicle every IT outage as evidence of Western-backed attempts to use Russia as a testing ground for cyberattack techniques.

“Russia a bit of a hindrance because she is one of two sides in the war, so she is almost a «legitimate target», provided that the attacking side is probably not a western country,» he says.

This semi-official information portal is starting to bite the war against Russia, and even Putin's ministers are forced to admit that the situation is getting worse for them.

Two weeks ago, Deputy Digital Minister Alexander Shoitov said: “Attacks are indeed getting more violent. They also masquerade as [distributed denial of service] attacks. The hackers are exploiting some pretty sophisticated vulnerabilities.»

In a vain attempt to reassure ordinary Russians, he added: «But the country is holding on, we're working efficiently, we're raising our security front.»

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However, these assurances may go unheeded. Local news reports said customs was «partially paralyzed» in April.

A freight business spokesman, Delko, said that only 44 vehicles were able to pass through customs posts in the days after the attacks, instead of the usual 200, as officials from tried their best to cope with normal volumes of traffic.

suspicion on them. The disruption inevitably falls on Ukraine, but in recent weeks Russia has begun pointing the finger at Volodymyr Zelensky's Western allies.

In June, Russia accused US intelligence agencies of a major cybersecurity breach affecting the country's Apple iPhone.

The FSB spy agency, no stranger to hacking in the West, said the US was behind an «intelligence operation» that compromised diplomats' phones.

Responding to the accusations, Apple said: «We have never worked with any government will put a backdoor in any Apple product and never will.»

The founder of the Russian-headquartered anti-virus company spoke about complex spyware» that engineers found on the phones of «senior and senior management» .

«We believe the proprietary nature of iOS is the root cause of this incident,» Evgeny Kaspersky said in June, referring to the Apple software that runs all iPhones.

«Detection and analysis of such threats is all the more difficult due to Apple's monopoly on research tools.»

However, the company representative did not point the finger at the West.

«We cannot speculate on the connection between any specific people. or groups and cyberattacks that have taken place,” the spokesman said. “As a cybersecurity provider, our job is technical attribution and attack analysis.”

Identifying the perpetrators of such cyberattacks is difficult, especially in the obscure world of online disruptions.

Dr. Lukas Oleinik, an independent geopolitical researcher, says what some Western sources in the cyber industry only hint at when it comes to cyber attacks on Russian companies: “We cannot rule out the involvement of Western state cyber operators or Ukrainian services — however, none of this will uncovered during this war.”

“Western states are guaranteed to be active,” he adds, “but they would rather focus on the effective use of such activities rather than flashy defacements or data leaks… Some of [this] is certainly done by amateur hackers.”

0804 Cyberattacks in Russia

Rafe Pilling, director of threats at cybersecurity company Secureworks, says checking claims about who hacked what in a country like Russia is fraught with problems.

“You can check in advance if someone claimed to be filming something, or you can check if it wasn’t available [in advance], but even that can be a bit tricky,” he says.

«Just like during the period of time when any IT failure in the West was a Russian cyberattack, I believe that within Russia there is or is developing a similar climate towards these groups,» adds Pilling.

According to Kaspersky Lab, the main threat to Russian companies is ransomware. This finding reflects a trend seen in the UK and US, where the main threat comes from Russian-speaking cybergroups using malware to hack. computer systems of their targets.

Customer requests to decrypt files encrypted by ransomware only reached a climax in January 2023, “exceeding half of the requests for the entire last [three months] of 2022,” the report says. companies. .

Whoever is behind the ongoing digital attacks on Russia, one thing is clear: while the country was once considered a cyberaggressor, the past year has shown it to be just as vulnerable as the West.