By 12 November 2019, hacker Alexei Burkov was extradited from Israel to the US to face major credit card fraud charges. Originally arrested in 2015 for his role in Cardplanet, his extradition was delayed several times as the Russian government was fighting against his extradition to the US. Israel subsequently received a competing extradition request from Russia. …
Figure 1. Internet blackout area during Moscow opposition protests
Governments, especially authoritarian ones, consider cutting the Internet as one of the ways to deal with political opposition and separatists. Major Internet disruptions were recently detected in India (Kashmir), Indonesia (Papua), Sudan, and, on a smaller scale, in Russia. Severing or completely…
Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) contractor SyTech lost documents in a cyber breach. One of the exposed secret Russian projects, dubbed Knockout, is targeting Western media in the US, Great Britain, Germany, France, and other countries. Knockout maps mass media IT infrastructure, extracts media metadata and collects their vulnerabilities.
Figure 1. SyTech logo…
On 1 May 2019, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed “Internet sovereignty” bill. New requirements to use ISPs to track traffic origin will likely force traffic decryption and support of internal censorship efforts. In the future, Russia will develop its own DNS system to conduct special Internet controls. Currently, LinkedIn is banned in Russia. Russian national payment system, Mir, was developed after several Russian banks were denied services by US-based Visa and…
