A New Competition

Why was the election about hacking and why Russia? It has been proven that the Russian government pursued a multi-faceted influence campaign into the election and used an aggressive abuse of cyber capabilities. They hacked a billion Yahoo users. The ransomware attacks raises concerns over future assaults. Even in the small town of Wiscasset, Maine weird things happened on their computers. Why? Their e-mails were hacked. The computer started to slow down then error messages popped up. Then a ransom message popped up requiring money in the form of bitcoins in order for you to get your data back. So this is the new highway robbery?

The Police Department there never even heard of a bitcoin before. They paid the ransom TWICE. What is in place to avoid this from happening again? Is anyone immune to cyberattacks? The problem has spread to all over the world. Thousands of police stations, hospitals and businesses have been attacked across the country. In 2016 alone it had grown to be a billion dollar a year crime and is still growing. This year the value of bitcoin currency doubled in value. The Department of Homeland Security and the National Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Center is trying to keep up with the problem of cyber- crimes.  

They have 24 hour 7 days a week people looking for incidents across the Federal government and domestic businesses. When they trace down a cyber- criminal often they are from Russia. In December they published a report that proved that “This activity by a Russian civilian and Military Intelligence services is part of an ongoing campaign of cyber-enabled operations directed at the United States Government and its citizens.” Why is Russia such a hub for hacking?

Well if your government approves of the hacking, you do it and make money too. Russians are smart and many years ago Stalin launched many polytechnical  schools. There are computer experts there and the schools were funded so they could build up their military with modern tools. What they didn’t teach was ethics so the expert computer engineers never questioned their activities. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the experts landed in companies. They are still willing and able to work with the Russian government. Russia now has cyber-security conferences which is just another name for the joining up of government sponsored hackers.

They are a young group and have contests for the fun of it hacking in car computers making it do stuff without a human in the driver’s seat. Fun. Not. Most of them are under the age of 30. Stolen data or privacy violations is just part of what they do. They are experts that understand security in every details. They have speedy hacking competitions. It is computer criminals gone wild. They even have included drinking into the competition. The game is called “Too Drunk to Hack.” They get an application which is protected by a firewall. If the firewall detects and attack, he needs to drink a shot of Vodka.

Another game is called Capture The Flag Competition. The goal is to hack into industrial companies like oil and gas, energy and distribution. All companies that are equipped by different smart and IOT (Internet of Things)  devices. Teams are formed to try to make attacks on these things. So if they can get control of the energy station, they have the power to leave the whole city without energy. With transportation, they can easily crash two trains. Yes, serious crimes have become games in Russia with no filter or ethics. No feeling of right or wrong. They have conventions! If they can hack it in convention games, they can hack in real time to real companies.

They have stolen 500 million Yahoo mail accounts, they stole 160 million credit cards from American corporations. You won’t even know that your e-mail has been hacked. The people don’t see themselves as criminals so we should expect these types of crimes happening more every year. We even have an American President, Trump who doesn’t think it is a problem. He likes the Russians. They buy his properties with lots of money. No questions asked where the money came from. A hacker can make about $70,000 per hack. They like to hack the United States because we do a lot of just about everything on computers and on the internet. It is a real war that is probably not going to go away anytime soon. Good Luck !