A thing of beauty! Belarus hackers do a ransomware attack on the Belarus rail network!

[thewayne]

The group, Cyber Partisans, made the following demands on Twitter:

We have encryption keys, and we are ready to return Belarusian Railroad's systems to normal mode. Our conditions:
🔺 Release of the 50 political prisoners who are most in need of medical assistance.
🔺Preventing the presence of Russian troops on the territory of #Belarus.

Belarus borders Ukraine and is "undergoing joint military exercises with Russia", i.e. Russian troops are swarming through its country, staging and ready to invade Ukraine at a moment's notice. The Cyber Partisans have thrown quite a monkey wrench into those plans by completely disabling the rail network!

In addition to encrypting the system's servers, they destroyed all the backups, which I guess were stored in a SAN online. Bad design there, fellas! The Partisans said that the network had many entry points and was poorly isolated from the internet.

Sometimes hactivists do a good job! I hope these people practices amazingly good operational security (OpSec), because if Putin or Lukeshenko find them, they are dead.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/01/hactivists-say-they-hacked-belarus-rail-system-to-stop-russian-military-buildup/

Comments

[rain_gryphon]

I can't see these people as anything other than terrorists. We should be offering the FBI and NSA's help in tracking them down.

[thewayne]

There's the old saying, one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter.  They're not doing it for money, they're doing it to try to disrupt a Putin thug autocrat's rule and to try to slow down the invasion of a neighboring country.  When there's a disparity of power and you can't directly rebel, this is one way to fight.

[rain_gryphon]

Given America's position in the world, it's scarcely to our advantage to encourage non-state groups to engage in asymmetrical warfare, even if it *is* against our enemies. It will come back to bite us in the ass, even if we do gain some temporary advantage from it. The safest long-term course would be to help Poroschenko hunt them down, and set the example that when you do this sort of thing, both sides will team up against you.

[thewayne]

Our government is not exactly broadcasting on Voice of America, "Hey, hackers!  Go help Ukraine!"  And if the hackers were working out of U.S. territory, yes, law enforcement should investigate this.  Highly unlikely Belarus would ask the FBI for a computer forensic team to come over, they are not exactly an American ally and I doubt we're going to offer to send one without an invitation.  As it stands, unless other evidence comes to light, it's purely a Belarusian internal affair: their leader has had protests against his administration for years.

How much of a dog do we have in this fight?  Ukraine is not a member of NATO: that's one of the big sticking points in this conflict.  I don't know what treaties we have with Ukraine.  We just sent them a bunch of missiles and ammunition, and we've beefed up our bases in Poland and another nearby country.  We don't want to see Ukraine sucked back into Putin's direct control because of its proximity to Poland and Germany, but it's Ukraine's and NATO's decision whether it gets to join NATO, not ours or Putins. To me, it looks like a bunch of saber rattling by Putin timed to shake things up for the November mid-term elections here to try to give Republicans more votes.  He does want to keep Ukraine out of NATO, but he can't afford a full war as the long-term costs to him personally and Russia in general would be devastating.