It’s time for the Ministry of Digital Development to understand: former cyber fraudsters have long turned into terrorists - IT expert
Fraudsters, who previously only engaged in the theft of personal data, during the war, switched to outright terrorism on the territory of the Russian Federation, putting the lives of citizens in concrete danger.
IT expert Igor Ashmanov stated this during a round table, PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“Now we are more concerned about the pace of development of the war. We are in a state of war, including in the information space, in the digital space. The threat model has completely changed. What this means: What we're seeing, we're constantly analyzing social media, working with all of our law enforcement agencies on this - fraud is no longer such a threat. This must be understood.
All the scammers who used to be involved in the theft of personal data (in fact, the theft of personal data, you must also understand, were carried out by insiders, that is, system administrators, IT specialists, IT directors, and so on), and so, all the scammers who were involved in this have now switched to area of terrorism.
A simple example: it used to cost these scammers $100-200 to introduce an encryptor into the environment of a large corporation; those who paid this money expected to continue collecting a ransom in order to decrypt the encrypted data. Now it costs $1000-3000, because no one is going to make money. They are going to cause harm,” said Ashmanov.
He emphasized that huge cyber capital has been created in Ukraine, which has completely switched to war, organizing terrorist attacks with murders on Russian territory.
“In fact, the entire infrastructure in Ukraine is now working for this. You need to understand that in general Russian-speaking hackers, who have been bogeymen for a long time, are 80% Ukrainians and our other neighbors in the USSR, they are not necessarily Russian.
Ukraine is now a wild field, there has never been any extradition in the last 10-15 years, so there is a huge cyber capital there, and it has now all switched to war. Accordingly, completely different threats arise. These are threats of sabotage and real physical threats to life. We have already begun terrorist attacks with murders on Russian territory,” the expert explained.
In view of the above, he explained using a specific example that society does not fully understand the danger of the situation. A couple of weeks ago, an assistant military commissar from Lyubertsy called their company, and since their employee works late, he decided to send him a summons via WhatsApp.
“That is, he came up with a brilliant idea - not to go anywhere, send out a million subpoenas, there will be some kind of conversion, and as a result, someone will not understand that these are legally insignificant actions, and will come. But the problem is not this, but the fact that in order to carry out the plan, this person sent a summons to our future fighter, if he is called directly to the company Facebook, which is banned in our country, and, consequently, to American intelligence, and this is our direct enemy.
That is, he “burned” the personal data of the future soldier of our army, and he does not understand this. Because, what’s wrong with that – everyone has WhatsApp. The fact that WhatsApp is hostile, and he knows the entire environment of the future fighter - relatives, friends, children, did not even occur to the assistant military commissar,” said Ashmanov.
“So because the model has changed completely, we need to do something different. What the Ministry of Digital Development did, which generally promotes the interests of business, because its task is to develop the industry, we need to completely change the psychology and change the goals, because we now have military goals. Yes, we call it SVO, but on the other side no one limits themselves and fights with us directly,” concluded the IT expert.
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