Irish Examiner view: Russia is also waging an online war

The Conti gang said to be based in Russia with links to state security services, has extorted large sums from European and US companies through providing affiliates with malware. Picture: Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire

The scale of the threat posed by cyber gangsters, another arm of Vladimir Putin’s pursuit of asymmetric warfare over the past two decades, is revealed in the news that garda experts are trawling through 60,000 messages from the Conti gang, the group responsible for the disabling ransomware attacks on Ireland in May 2021.

The records were released after the criminals initially sided with the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrating increasing tensions within the hacking communities as digital conflict is ramped up as part of the war.

The Conti gang is said to be based in Russia with links to state security services, has extorted large sums from European and US companies through providing affiliates with malware. Their model is described as ‘ransomware as a service’, riffing on the legitimate software as a service offered by technology companies. They get a cut of the ransom, and the fear is that, as foreign currency becomes increasingly tight behind Putin’s Iron Curtain, attacks will expand and additional sums will be siphoned off to feed the war machine.

The former head of Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre, Ciaran Martin, told the Irish Examiner security correspondent Cormac O’Keeffe  that the declaration of support for the assault on Ukraine provided “an unusually obvious glimpse into the strange but largely symbiotic relationship between the Russian state and organised cybercriminality”.

The Conti gang is said to be based in Russia with links to state security services, has extorted large sums from European and US companies through providing affiliates with malware.

Challenges

There are significant challenges to our interconnected world where the easy transfer of information envisaged by the world wide web is being increasingly atomised through political interference and controls. We already have the great firewall of China, and Russia is embarking on its own crackdown in an attempt to accelerate what some technologists are calling ‘the splinternet’.

Facebook, Twitter, and Western news websites have been blocked by Roskomnadzor, Russia’s communications regulator. Downloads of virtual private networks (VPNs) which allow such controls to be bypassed have trebled in a week but the regime is exercising ever closer control over media consumption and is trying to kill journalists reporting in Ukraine. Independent journalism has been criminalised by laws passed in the Duma making it illegal to distribute ‘fake news’ (thank you for that contribution to the lexicon, Donald Trump) about what is happening in Ukraine.

Several leading news organisations, including the BBC and Bloomberg, have judged it prudent to suspend their reporting inside the country. Meanwhile, the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, whose editor was a joint winner of last year’s Nobel Peace Prize, has said it will remove material on military
actions in Ukraine from its website because of censorship.

In this interconnected world, we can be sure that the digital frontier will be a battlefield in the months ahead. Loss of network capacity can have dramatic consequences. We need clarity on how to minimise the disruptive threat. Disaster recovery planning might have to start in the home.