You find it improbable that geopolitical enemies tend to be the ones that attack us? Feels like saying "I find it weird that people I insult disproportionately punch me in the face".

It's also a very old technique to proxy attacks through countries without extradition treaties.

I don't disagree, obviously. But the question here is if it's reasonable to find that hackers in countries that we consider to be political enemies disproportionately are the ones hacking us.

There are numerous incentives that, to me, make it not only reasonable but extraordinarily likely.

Plus, recent political history and the kinds of benefits delivered by political actors suggest several things: hacking's taken on a special significance as wielded by state actors, there's a considerable amount of delegation to shall we say less expert practitioners who are only loosely controlled, and there's a great deal of effort put forth to deny ANYTHING of the sort ever goes on, ever ever.

To me all this seems par for the course. There's nothing unusual about any of it. It's what you would expect. It's basically like distributed stochastic terrorism, indirectly/loosely driven by a more capable state actor with specific intent to establish deniability.

Not even plausible deniability. Just some convenient way to say 'Nyet! And we are VERY OFFENDED that you would even suggest such a thing!'.

Just the fortunes of war, really.

I think you are assigning too much “us vs them” to the ransomware marketplace.

With ransomware criminals, “us” is the attacker, and “them” is everyone with a computer who might pay. Political boundaries don’t factor in to it at all. It is by nature an anonymous attack, hence the term “ransom”.

It is strange to me that almost all high-profile ransomware attacks that have been publicized in the US are claimed by the FBI to be Russian or Chinese. There are plenty of other countries with greedy criminals that know software, too.

> I think you are assigning too much “us vs them” to the ransomware marketplace.

Attacking things in a foreign jurisdiction is massively appealing from a "what will get me thrown in jail by my own government if things go wrong" perspective. You don't need any political loyalty for that calculation.

The problem is that state-level actors are considerably more sophisticated in their activities than what was seen here. There was a story on HN a while back that can best be summed up as "Defending against this is impossible: Mossad is gonna Mossad and there is nothing you can do about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26591669

There's a difference between a criminal who is state sanctioned and a state-level actor.

When your government greenlights criminal activities against their enemies it helps a lot. Many* cyber criminals act as mercs for hire, and are in fact hired for official government operations against the US.

It's simply not true that political boundaries don't factor in. They're a massive part - most obviously, consider extradition or whether the attacker's government will cooperate with the US.

* I say many, but it's more like "it happens", but it feels important to point out.

I always thought it would be fun, if one had enough pull, to get a Letter of Marque and Reprisal issued to oneself snuck onto one of the giant omnibus bills that nobody in the Congress reads in its entirety before voting on it. It could easily be interpreted to cover cyberprivateering.

It is absolutely trivial for an attacker in the US or anywhere to make their ransomware attack appear to come from Russia (to someone who doesn’t know that).

I don't see how that's relevant to the incentives of foreign enemies attacking us. As I said, there are many. It basically stops being criminal activity.

Do you really think that's not the case, or that that isn't going to considerably skew where these attacks come from?

I think he's making the point that the attributions of "This came from <insert geopolitical enemy here>" are without any evidence. How exactly do you determine that a hack originated in Russia when Russian ips will not hand over their traffic to US authorities? Just because a lot of illicit web traffic originates from Israeli servers, for example, does not mean that it originated in Israel. In reality, our cyber security agencies have no idea where these guys are coming from: it COULD very well be from Russia, sure, but it could also be from your neighbor next door who vpn'd in through a chain of servers starting in france and ending in mali.

> I think he's making the point that the attributions of "This came from <insert geopolitical enemy here>" are without any evidence.

Badly, I guess, because no one has mentioned evidence or a lack of evidence anywhere in the thread.

> How exactly do you determine that a hack originated in Russia when Russian ips will not hand over their traffic to US authorities?

There are a lot of different ways. GEOIP is just one method. Examining the artifacts for code-reuse from other malware is another big one. Looking at the types of attacks is another ie: "this malware uses these techniques, and these are favored by groups 1,2,3".

There's a lot more to it than that, and not all of it is public. I've seen attribution done through backdoor channels that were not strictly legal.

> In reality, our cyber security agencies have no idea where these guys are coming from

No, more often than not we definitely do.

That might be easier to believe if these ransomware strains didn't do things like automatically disable themselves on computers with Russian language support installed.

Yes, nobody in the west using a compromised russian box for c&c would ever put such code in their ransomware payload. That would obfuscate its origin, and we all know criminals aren't clever enough for that sort of thing.

There can only be one explanation: russian hackers operating with Putin's tacit approval. Us in the west should add this to the mounting pile of "evidence" supporting going into another cold war, because that will surely improve the entire situation. Attributing the unattributable to our preconceived enemies to escalate a conflict always ends well.

Snark aside, on a technical, factual level, this simply isn't evidence of origin, not even a little bit. "russian hackers" is such a tired punchline now that if I, being in the west, were to suddenly jump the fence after 3 decades and choose A Life Of Crime, using russian configuration file names, UTC+3 daytime operating hours, russian-hosted c&c IPs (or, better yet, russia-controlled but plausibly deniable ones like belarus or kazakhstan), and silly stuff like skipping infection of ru-locale machines would be obvious things I would be doing to fuel this existing narrative sailwind. It's utterly silly to think that this in any way suggests origin.

Exactly, people do not understand how trivially easy it is to completely halt US investigations into internet traffic origins just by pivoting off of a box in a country which doesn't hand over its ip logs to the United States. I would imagine that, should you choose to hack a russian target, you would pivot off of an american box (or would the US hand those logs over? I actually think they might even if Russia wouldn't reciprocate).

Russian and a bunch of other CIS countries. It could very well originate from Moldova or Kazakhstan.

I think you’re conflating a wide range of things: most attacks aren’t linked to those countries and the ones which are often take time to link. Ransomware attacks have been happening frequently for ages, but most of them don’t reach the level where they’re being classed as infrastructure attacks — they’re gangs of opportunists looking for easy money. You find them in countries like Russia because there are only a few places which don’t cooperate with US/EU law enforcement, especially at the level where someone without powerful backers can rely on it. These guys caught a much bigger fish than they were prepared for and weren’t anywhere close to being prepared for a nation-state to seriously pursue them. Anyone trying this from most other countries would either be caught or much better at staying hidden.

Well, "Russian hackers" doesn't mean, Russian military. If I was a Russian hacker, and didn't want to piss off my own government, I may well consider that my best targets would be my country's political enemies. From what I hear, it might even eventually get you a sweet job with gov.

There are only a few countries which don't extradite cybercriminals to the west and don't prosecute them for foreign attacks - so these few countries are very attractive from which to run such operations; and even for international crime organizations it's good to have the "dirty work" done from such places, where the grunts won't get arrested and be motivated to sell you out for a plea deal.

The problem is you don't even have to run your operation from the country: you just have to pivot off of a box in that country as part of your obfuscation chain. In Cyber Security land, a lot of bad actors originate out of Israel, but that doesn't mean they originated there.

It’s well known that the Kremlin is very hospitable to cyber criminals as long as the stay away from the Soviet bloc. It also just so happens that a country with that sort of reckless policy, has lots of other bad policies which make them an enemy of the US and many other countries…

It’s not a conspiracy. You just have the cause and effect backwards.

I can't think of a better place to launch an attack on the US than the US's geopolitical enemies, can you?