2. Kind of a "worse is better" phenomenon. This is apocryphal but while Americans and Europeans were digging into Apple IIs and Commodores, Russia just had crappy knockoff machines that didn't follow the behavior of the machines they were meant to be clones of, so anyone who stuck with it long enough basically taught themselves reverse engineering and the operation of "weird machines", how to operate in environments of undefined behavior. Thats just how I heard it, I'd like to learn more about their history since their space program was pretty one-to-one with ours, they definitely had computer engineers and programmers just as sophisticated as USA
You can see some of this with Anonymous and the FBI these days, too, and NSO Group and Israel. I wouldn't be surprised if most countries do this, now.
/s
Russians also have a world-class reputation in math and physics. At least they did in the 20th century. Now that experiments are so capital intensive, theoretical physics has become unfalsifiable silliness, I would assume that these people went into software. Although I could be wrong.
It may be worth taking a look at the conditions that first gave rise to the eastern European malware scene in the late 80's, particularly in the Soviet Union and Bulgaria:
https://bontchev.nlcv.bas.bg/papers/factory.html
In particular, the presence of the necessary information and lack of economic opportunity gave rise to the original scene, and today that has transformed into an environment where the economic opportunity is directly tied to various for-profit black-hat activities (ransomware, identity theft and credit card fraud, etc.).
It is possible to link the relative lack of other economic opportunities to corruption, and that is a valid observation, but if black hat activities weren't profitable and relatively safe from retaliation (as long as you avoid Russian targets), the scene would still be typified by disaffected individuals rather than organized professional groups.
I'm not sure if creating a bunch of startups to soak up the extra talent would work, as the incentives to get a leg up on the competition via the Dark Arts (DDOS your competitor, spear-phishing their sales people, etc.) would still be pretty strong.
Russia has been doing asymmetric operations, e.g. buying the US republican party was a lot cheaper than winning a war against the US but effectively was almost as good. Helping far-right, anti-democracy, anti-EU, anti-NATO politicians worldwide has been destabilizing. Organizing both the racist and the anti-racist demonstration at the same place and time has kept people and governments distracted. They do a lot of mafia style things to bribe, intimidate and kill people into doing what they want. Turns out going after politicians is more effective than going after military officers because counter-intelligence is more hesitant to act when they suspect a politician of working with/for Russia.
Another thing is that the US military has been trained to be deathly afraid of appearing to have an opinion on politics, and this is both good and bad.
Russian defence spending is about 1/12 that of the US, but between having lower grade equipment, conscription and cheaper domestic prices they probably get 2x to 3x bang for their buck, at least on paper. As we can see in Ukraine, in practice much of the bang is over hyped, but it still gives them the brute muscle to do a lot of regional bullying.
The reason everyone thought they were a great military power is because the Soviets were presumably a great military power with a large army and a lot of hardware. Tanks, aircraft, artillery etc etc. And when it all fell apart the Russians inherited the lion's share.
Russia has lower costs in terms of personnel, lower wages and the like will somewhat lower the overhead of their military. But I think everyone overestimated how much that would help. See, raw materials costs the same around the world more or less. Titanium costs the same in Russia as it does in the US. Same for steel or any other resource that is on the global market. So Russia can only build a tank so much cheaper than Europe or the US can, but there is a floor to that price. On top of that they have been under sanctions for years for a lot of important things they can't make domestically like advanced semiconductors.
Then there is the fact Russia is a well known kleptocracy. They may very well have nominally lower personnel costs but that's likely balanced by much higher corruption.
And when you think of the sheer size of their military, all of those nuclear subs. All of those ICBMs, there are a lot of expensive things there that will easily take up large chunks of their budget.
I think much of the conventional side of the Russian military was left to rot and much of what we were shown pre-invasion was just that, a show. T14 functionally does not exist. Same with Su-57. They are cool show pieces but the real military are using 30+ year old hardware that has been piecemeal upgraded and not well maintained.
Russia has a big and advanced army. But the advanced army is not big. And the big army is not advanced.
Same reason NK is. Same reason every country is. It is rather cheap in comparison. I mean even the largest super computers only cost a few hundred million. That's rather cheap when you consider other military adventures. One state of the art super computer is roughly the price of one (maybe 2) modern jets. The biggest cost is people. And you can do a ton of damage with hacking.
The costs are low, benefits are high.
[0] Summit was $350m, and a F22 costs $140m (per jet, not including development costs which is hundreds of billions)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
But yeah it's all of the factors you mentioned.
1) they are very good at hacking
2) they are not so good at hacking
3) Russia is a popular place for hackers to set up proxies
Actually I don't see a ton of news about national-security related hacking by Russia.
Asymmetric commercial hacking is pretty easy to explain: hacking foreign entities is safer than hacking domestic ones in terms of risk exposure, and hacking entities in countries richer than yours is more attractive than the other way round.
What precisely are the incentives for multinational corporations to censor news about American cyber malfeasance, especially given how acute and prolonged a regulatory headache unchecked American surveillance created for them in Europe?
And where are these news stories coming from?
Narcotics, prostitution, gambling, smuggling, and computer crime all take organization and capitalization. It's just that in some places such organizations control the reigns of political power brazenly and shamelessly.