Out & Equal at Work by 36 LGBT Professionals and A...

Many of the hacking groups that do function as proxies carry out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, but these attacks are not particularly effective in the long run. Vitiuk said that many of the cybercriminals who participate in this kind of activity are usually “young, but talented people searching for easy money.” Even for the cybercriminal groups that are purely financially motivated, the message from the Russian government is “you attack and we won’t put you into prison,” he said. “And now you need to work against Ukraine.”īy May, the prosecution of the REvil suspects had stalled, and an attorney for one of the arrested individuals openly suggested to Russian media that his client should be released to work for Russian security services and that any funds seized from his client should be donated as “humanitarian aid” to people living in the Russian-occupied areas of eastern Ukraine. “This was an attempt to intimidate them and others to show that you need to work for us,” Vitiuk said. In reality, Vitiuk said, this was a ploy. In the weeks ahead of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, the Kremlin cracked down on Russian cybercriminals, including by arresting several members of the REvil ransomware gang, raising hopes that Moscow was finally reining in the cybercriminal underground. “I do believe that there is no so-called ‘hacktivism’ in Russia at all.”

“More than 90% of all cyber attacks targeting Ukraine are either conducted by special services or by state sponsored groups,” Vitiuk. Most of those groups are fronts for various Russian government agencies, and in other cases, they are coerced by the Russian government into performing attacks or publishing hacked materials obtained by more established Russian government hacking units, said Illia Vitiuk, the head of the Department of Cyber Information Security in the Security Service of Ukraine.

SAN FRANCISCO - In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a flurry of pro-Russian “hacktivist” groups have claimed to carry out attacks on Russian enemies in a fit of patriotism.īut that’s largely a fiction, a top Ukrainian cybersecurity official told CyberScoop on Thursday.

Out & Equal at Work by 36 LGBT Professionals and A...