The ransom attack on Medibank involving the personal information of nearly 10 million Australians has exposed another front in the geopolitical confrontation between Russia and the world.
The criminal gang REvil’s hacking, ransom and release of personal details of Medibank’s customers serves a secondary strategic goal of the Kremlin by “punishing” businesses in Western allies.
Story here:
Given the interest in Elon Musk’s flirtation with the Kremlin view on Ukraine, the topic of the Western tech world’s openness to Kremlin narratives has emerged again. I’ve gotten a small spike of interest in a presentation I made at SXSW in 2018. So I’ll share it here again in a downloadable form. If I did the same presentation today, I’d have much to add – including about Elon Musk.
Some of the first evidence of the scale of the cyber conflict going on over Ukraine appears in this release from Microsoft. The key lines are:
“Before the Russian invasion, our teams began working around the clock to help organizations in Ukraine, including government agencies, defend against an onslaught of cyberwarfare that has escalated since the invasion began and has continued relentlessly.”
“Since then, we have observed nearly all of Russia’s nation-state actors engaged in the ongoing full-scale offensive against Ukraine’s government and critical infrastructure, and we continue to work closely with government and organizations of all kinds in Ukraine to help them defend against this onslaught. “
Full statement here:
https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2022/04/07/cyberattacks-ukraine-strontium-russia/
“If anything, the strategy of declassifying intelligence around Russia’s intentions has given the US a taste of something it hasn’t known in years: some control of the international narrative.”
For now.
Full story here.
The Cold War Daily 