While we were raging about Putin's meddling and Kremlin hackers, Five Eyes were pwning Yandex, Russia's Google Hackers from the Five Eyes intelligence agencies have been accused of breaking into systems at Yandex, dubbed Russia's Google. A report by Reuters today cites four sources claiming Western spies are believed to be behind a malware infection spotted spreading among developer machines at the Russian search, webmail, and …
"was called in by Yandex to help clean up the infection and help attribute the attack to Five Eyes intel agencies." so that reads to me as though the Russian authorities told the BIg K to say it was the Five Eyes regardless of whether it was or not. I mean, it probably was, but it's worded strangely.
Yes, it's weird phrasing. There is a reasonable possible explanation, though. When you've been breached, it is not terribly uncommon for it to be pretty clear who the attacker was but not have ironclad proof (this is particularly true if the attackers were professionals). In such a case, one of the things you would task the cleanup team with is to find that proof.
I'm not saying that's what the case is here -- I have no way of knowing one way or another -- but it is a plausible explanation.
Nuances like that could arise from the translation. After all, we have a long tradition of translations completely changing the meaning of a story: for instance, many of the core Bible narratives.
In this instance, of course we can't know. The timing looks suspiciously like hitting back at recent stories, though as far as I recollect the current crop haven't been directed at Russia but instead cast China and Iran as their villains. Maybe they suspect a new Russian-spying story could be next?
Of course Five Eyes complains about hacking, and of course they hack. It's not hypocritical, it's just part of the business.
Both activities are intended to gain an advantage in some way.
It's plausible that the Five Eyes hack less, compared to many other countries, but that's it.
OK, so individuals within the Five Eyes (say USA, for instance) probably hack less than some other countries. I don't think they generally indulge in large scale industrial espionage (unlike PRC almost certainly does), for instance.
The USA very likely deployed Stuxnet. Russia very likely attacked the Ukranian power system twice in a few months. There have very likely been similar cyber-physical attacks mounted by both sides in the past 20 years or so - Stuxnet was just the first well known one.
Without having access to the sort of information that is well classified, informed speculation on other comparisons, eg who hacks the most, is almost impossible.
And the five eyes is still the five eyes.
It's not hypocritical, it's just part of the business.
That's not either/or. It's totally hypocritical (which is what motivates me to criticise them). But it's also just part of the business.
It's plausible that the Five Eyes hack less, compared to many other countries, but that's it.
Your "plausible" is quite a stretch there. Stuxnet alone was in a class of its own!
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If you have not read every story in the papers where the UK or US complain about Russian or Chinese hacking and not thought 'we are hypocrites, why make a song and dance about stuff we are doing daily too?' then you have not been keeping up with what the spy agencies of the world do.
The Five eyes countries are hacking every other country for economical and political benefit daily with hundreds of operations going targeting thousands of people. So is China, Russia, North Korean, Iran and many other countries you hear little about.
We talk about Russia influencing elections but forget how many coups the CIA have been involved with and the fact the US and UK military have departments just dealing with social media influencing to point people towards whatever goal we want.
So next article ask once again, are hypocritical much?
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