PUTIN’S CYBERWAR 17 proxy servers in Lithuania. Without a shot being fired, the country’s entire financial infrastructure was forced into exile. For a number of years, Russian government officials habitually denied any responsibility for these attacks. But in December 2011, Konstantin Goloskokov, a prominent figure in the pro-Kremlin Nashi youth movement, in an interview with the Financial Times, admitted that he and some of his 18 associates had launched the 2007 attacks on Estonia. 4.2 Government Agencies Sometime around 25 July 2015, the unclassified email system of the US Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of 19 Staff was subjected to a “sophisticated cyberattack”. Some 4,000 military and civilian personnel who work for the Joint Chiefs of Staff were affected, and the system was shut down and taken offline for nearly two weeks. The system had been infiltrated by malware that rapidly gathered massive amounts of data and equally rapidly distributed all the information to thousands of accounts on the Internet. Only unclassified accounts and emails were hacked, and no classified information was compromised. The incident was not a one-off. A month earlier, in June, the tax returns of more than 100,000 20 people were stolen from the Internal Revenue System, in a cyberattack. Earlier still, in March, the State Department revealed that hackers had been targeting its unclassified email system for much 21 of the previous 12 months. Individuals close the Department described the intrusion as the “worst ever” cyberattack against a federal agency. So deep had the intrusion been that the hackers had obtained email correspondence from individuals within the White House with whom President 22 Obama regularly communicated. And so severe had it been that the Department had, in November 2014, shut down its email system over a weekend to try to improve security and block the intruders. Russia has strongly denied its involvement in these cyberattacks, despite evidence that suggests 23 otherwise. But it is not only government agencies in the US that have been targeted. On 17 July 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was destroyed over eastern Ukraine while on a scheduled flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. All 298 people on board were killed. Two months after the disaster, an international investigation into the crash was launched, led by the Dutch Safety Board. Shortly before the Board released its detailed report, on 13 October 2015, it 24 was hit by a cyberattack. The attack lasted for several days, eventually ending after the report had 17 At the same time, mass text messages were sent from an anonymous source to Estonia’s Russian-speaking minority population, telling them to drive very slowly through the city centre at a certain time of day. The drivers kept moving, so technically no crime was committed, but it brought Tallinn to a virtual standstill. Then the telephone numbers of vital government services all started ringing at once, nonstop, as they were swamped by robot calls. 18 Clover, C., ‘Kremlin-backed group behind Estonia cyber blitz’, Financial Times, 11 March 2009, available at: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/57536d5a- 0ddc-11de-8ea3-0000779fd2ac.html#axzz46TAOpQxb, last visited: 6 May 2016. 19 Kube, C. and Jim Miklaszewski, ‘Russia hacks Pentagon computers: NBC, citing sources’, NBC News, 6 August 2015, available at: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/06/russia-hacks-pentagon-computers-nbc-citing-sources.html, last visited: 6 May 2016. 20 Frates, C., ‘IRS believes massive data theft originated in Russia’, CNN, 5 June 2015, available at: http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/27/politics/irs-cyber- breach-russia/, last visited: 6 May 2016. 21 Perez, E. and Shimon Prokupecz, ‘Sources: State Dept. hack the “worst ever”’, CNN, 10 March 2015, available at: http://edition.cnn.com/2015/03/10/politics/state-department-hack-worst-ever/, last visited: 6 May 2016. 22 Schmidt, M. S. and David E. Sanger, ‘Russian Hackers Read Obama’s Unclassified Emails, Officials Say’, The New York Times, 25 April 2015, available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/us/russian-hackers-read-obamas-unclassified-emails-officials-say.html, last visited: 6 May 2016. 23 Perez, E. and Shimon Prokipecz, ‘How the U.S. thinks Russians hacked the White House’, CNN, 8 April 2015, available at: http://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/07/politics/how-russians-hacked-the-wh/, last visited: 13 May 2016. 24 Hacquebord, F. ‘Pawn Storm Targets MH17 Investigation Team’, Trend Micro, 22 October 2015, available at: http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs- security-intelligence/pawn-storm-targets-mh17-investigation-team/, last visited: 6 May 2016. 6
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