Kremlin Accused of DDOS Cyberbullying
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Russia has been used as the launch-pad for a new wave of cyberattacks aimed at political and media organizations.
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Could a concerted cyber attack by hackers and bloggers bring the government to its knees? A mock array of cyber catastrophes suggests that it could. That's the official, if heavily censored, word.
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Semi-organized people just as dangerous as botnets In late April, a Russian-speaking blogger upset with recent events in Estonia posted a series of dispatches calling on like-minded people to attack government servers in that country.â¦
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A new Eastern European Web site uses a large botnet to infect vulnerable PCs--clients are charged for each successful PC infection.
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Will political forces split the internet root? ICANN 2007 Los Angeles The Washington Post reported unwelcome news yesterday for our internet overlords - as internet penetration in Russia grows exponentially, the story claims, Vladimir Putin's allies are increasingly focused on strong-arming blogs and internet news sources in Russia to get their message across, efforts which may extend to the internet root itself.â¦
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The charges opened a new line of legal attack against a Kremlin foe who was once regarded as Russiaâs richest man.
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Estonia is seeking help from Russia to  find the culprits behind a massive wave of attacks on the  country's Internet infrastructure, Prime Minister Andrus Ansip  said on Wednesday.
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MOSCOW, Aug. 27 -- Russia's chief prosecutor announced Monday that 10 people involved in the killing of journalist Anna Politkovskaya had been arrested, alleging that those behind the murder of the well-known Kremlin critic included members of Russia's police and security services.
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(InfoWorld) - Six men have been charged with orchestrating a phishing scheme that targeted AOL users, the U.S. Department of Justice said Wednesday. The men are accused of harvesting thousands of AOL e-mail addresses and then infecting victims' PCs with malicious software that would prevent them from logging on to AOL without entering their credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and other personal information. Under the scam, victims would receive fake e-mail greeting cards that would silently infect their computers with the log-on software, according to a grand jury indictment. Victims were also spammed with phoney e-mail messages that claimed to have come from AOL's billing department. "Due to a central server meltdown, your credit card information was lost," one such e-mail read, according to the indictment. "In order to enjoy your AOL experience and keep your account active, you must enter your credit card information within 24 hours." Some of the fake greeting cards claimed to come from Web sites such as Hallmark.com or BlueMountain.com, the indictment states. AOL users appear to have been the primary targets of the fraud, but others may also have been targeted, according to Tom Carson, a spokesman for the United States Attorney's office for the District of Connecticut. "The investigation is ongoing," he said. "I think we can say the bulk of those targeted were AOL users, but we can't say with 100 percent certainty that they were the only victims," he said. The accused are believed to have defrauded thousands of individuals, U.S. Attorney Kevin O'Connor said in a statement. "These are insidious crimes that wreak havoc on the lives of victims, and we will seek strict terms of imprisonment." The alleged scam was conducted over a two-year period, beginning in 2004, the U.S. Attorney said. Proceeds from the crime were used to purchase gaming consoles, laptop computers and gift cards, the indictment states. The men were actually indicted on fraud charges last week by a federal grand jury in New Haven, but the charges were not made public until Wednesday, when three of the men pleaded guilty. The three who have pleaded guilty face between two years and nine and a half years in prison, Carson said. They are Charlie Blount Jr., 22, of Branford, Connecticut, Richard D'Andrea, 22, of West Haven, Connecticut, and Thomas Taylor Jr., 20, also of West Haven. They are scheduled to be sentenced in mid-December. The three men awaiting arraignment are Michael Dolan, 22, of North Miami Beach, Florida, Keith Riedel, 20, of Winter Haven, Florida, and Daniel Mascia, 22, of West Haven. Dolan had previously been sentenced to two years of probation after pleading guilty to accessing a protected computer without authorization.
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(InfoWorld) - Two months after much of Estonia's online infrastructure wasÂ targeted by an online attack, the U.S government is sending cyberinvestigators to help the Baltic state better understand what happened. A representative from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's US-CERT (U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team) division is heading to Estonia this week to help analyze the large volume of data that was generated by the attacks, said Gregory Garcia, assistant secretary for cyber security and telecommunications with the DHS. "We are sending someone from our organization ... to help them with forensic analysis and to do some additional training on how to secure their infrastructure," he said. Additionally, a member of the U.S. Secret Service will be there to help with training on incident response and computer crime investigations, according to a DHS spokesman. In April, a widespread DDOS attack struck Estonia and affected government and banking Web sites. Early press reports linked the attacks to Russia, exacerbating tensions between the two countries, but investigators now say thatÂ it is unclear who exactly was behind the incident. "The data that we have does not speak to who's behind it. There's no smoking gun," said Jose Nazario, senior security engineer with Arbor Networks, who has studied the attacks. Unlike other Internet conflicts, the Estonian attacks do not seem to have been backed by a particular hacking group, said Gadi Evron, a security evangelist with Beyond Security. "They were of immense variety [and came] from the population of the Russian-speaking blogosphere," he said. Some attackers ran simple scripts on their PCs, while others trained sophisticated groups of botnet computers at the Estonian systems, Evron said. "Many of the attacks were from fake sources and compromised computers around the world," he added. During the incident, several international organizations helped the tiny country repel the online attacks, Garcia said. "This was -- at least in the aftermath -- a good news story in the sense that Estonia looked to NATO for assistance and together the NATO countries came to the aid of Estonia," Garcia said. "It showed that the relationships we have internationally and across the federal government are paying off so we can respond in real time to attacks that are happening." Garcia said that members of US-CERT could learn how the U.S. should respond if faced with a similar attack. "It's a little bit more complicated than conventional warfare," he said. "It's a little difficult to trace back where a particular attack is coming from, which makes it more difficult to respond." Arbor Networks' Nazario agreed that investigators will get a much clearer picture of how the attacks evolved over time. "They can basically learn what ... technologies and what techniques worked under those attacks," he said.
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Russia has filed new charges of large-scale fraud and abuse of office against self-exiled business mogul Boris Berezovsky, a prosecutor said Wednesday.
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Russian military prosecutors say a report highlighting widespread bullying and violence against conscripts in the Russian Army is an exaggeration.
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(InfoWorld) - A Russian computer security expert predicts that terrorists could seek to target the country's critical infrastructure through electronic warfare, a strategy that could raise the stakes in how Russia handles computer crime. While terrorists aren't believed to currently have the know-how to disrupt critical infrastructure, it would be "very dangerous" if they start learning, said Valery Vasenin, head of the Computer Security Department at the Institute for Information Security Problems (IISP) at Moscow State University. "I think the phenomenon of terrorism will go in this direction," Vasenin said in an interview at his office. "This is probably the most important problem for the coming years." Russia's energy grid is a possible target, which could cause widespread blackouts. The air transportation or fuel distribution systems are other possible targets, Vasenin said. Russia has experienced chilling episodes of terrorism. In September 2004, 331 people, more than half of whom were children, were killed when Chechen separatists stormed a school in Beslan. In October 2002, Chechen rebels took 850 people hostage in a Moscow theater; 117 died after Russian forces used a poisonous gas before entering the premises. No major cyberterrorism incident in Russia has been recorded. However, the country's infrastructure is becoming more networked and less isolated than before, which could make it more vulnerable to cyberattacks, Vasenin said. "Russia, at the moment, is average in terms of computer security, like the rest of the world," Vasenin said. In the 1990s, the Internet in Russia was still viewed as something of a domain for academics, Vasenin said. But the rapid change of technology and emergence of threats has led to greater attention to security issues, he said. Moscow State University's IISP was established in 2004 to study network security, the psychology of human behavior and the Internet, along with computer forensics and judicial issues. Russia lacks laws that clearly define computer crime, he said, making it difficult for Internal Affairs Ministry agents to investigate and bring cases. IISP is studying other countries' computer crime laws and formulating recommendations. "They [the Internal Affairs Ministry] are somewhat unarmed," Vasenin said. "We understand we [Russia] have these problems related to legislation, just as there are worldwide problems." Through June, Russia recorded 8,400 computer-related crimes, according to figures released by the Internal Affairs Ministry in October. Forty-three percent of the cases were related to online auction fraud, with the remainder comprising information theft, unauthorized access, child pornography violations and others, the ministry said. Boris Miroshnikov, who heads the cybercrime department in Russia's Internal Affairs Ministry, has called for more trained experts to handle criminal cases that often cross international borders. Miroshnikov's comments at a cybersecurity conference were published earlier this year by Moscow State University. "Do we have today a school of experts in the field of cybercrimes?" Miroshnikov told conference participants. "Unfortunately, I do not think so." (Pavel Kupriyanov of Computerworld Russia contributed to this report.) Â
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Lycos&#39; European anti-spam website was taken down only hours after it went live. The outage appears to be the result of a DDoS attack, most likely initiated by spammers in response to the search engine&#39;s &quot;Make
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An Estonian court has fined a man in  the only conviction linked to cyber attacks on official Web  sites during last year's riots over the relocation of a  Soviet-era war memorial, it said on Thursday.
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The Russian Orthodox clergy are engaged in an intense debate over providing spiritual guide to internet users.
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Several antispam organizations have been targeted by an attempt to knock them offline.