Re:An update on the threat landscape
by heavyset_go on Monday March 07, 2022 @09:40PM
(#30595843)
> The Russian gov't looks the other way. Hackers in any other country might fear prosecution & extradition, but Russian hackers are protected as long as they don't attack Russians.
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.
How does that even work? Does the NSA post on 4chan asking for l33t hax0rs to do a job?
They run operations like Cicda3301 to recruit to ones that make it to the end.
/s
Ok but seriously they fund things like USAMTS which I assume gives them access to a list of promising young Americans.
That's boring maths though. Great, they found some people that can do hard maths. Cicada3301 winners prove they have a wide range of abilities. You're "tests" would be fine for the NSA types that just sit in a gov't cubicle going blind on cyphers. CIA wants people that can figure things out without getting caught.
The parent comment asked about the NSA, and, well, they happen to do a lot of math.
I found Lex Friedman's interview with Nicole Perlroth discussion of hacker culture and the mechanics of creating and selling 0-days to nation-state actors interesting.
Re:An update on the threat landscape
by ASalazarMX on Tuesday March 08, 2022 @12:44PM
(#30602965)
Aren't they famous for going to hacker conventions and looking like another fellow hacker instead of a suit? the NSA even has given talks at DEFCON.
You really think there aren't computer security experts from government organisations on 4chan? I thought half of its schtick was it was a wide range of humans from all walks of life, pretending to be (or actually being) whatever-it-is that humans become without any form of supervision.
Re:An update on the threat landscape
by heavyset_go on Tuesday March 08, 2022 @12:06AM
(#30596631)
I'd imagine direct and indirect infiltration. Hackers charged with crimes, who are part of a larger group, sometimes get plea deals. As part of their deals, they might give up accounts, keys, data, or evidence from the group, and/or work as confidential informants for the government.
>they definitely had computer engineers and programmers just as sophisticated as USA
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.
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