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By Root 1255 0

Ivanovich Slipchenko, attracted foreign comment.[85] By decade’s end, the Russian military was consolidating significant offensive and defensive IO capabilities in the Electronic Warfare (EW) Troops. Indeed, speaking at a conference in February 2008—before the August Russia-Georgia conflict—Deputy Chief of the General Staff Aleksandr Burutin stated that the military, and the security services, were creating appropriate units and conducting training. In an April 2010 Krasnaya Zvezda interview, Chief of Russian Electronic Warfare Troops Colonel Oleg Ivanov stated that the EW Troops had special equipment for operations against information management systems.[86]

The senior officer’s statements highlighted an ongoing process. In June 2001 Russian Public Television, ORT, presented a segment on the Voronezh Military Radio-Electronics Institute (VIRE). The ORT correspondent stated that the institute started one secret information security school in 1997, and then another secret school devoted to information warfare. The information warfare school began training professional hackers for the military in 2001. Both schools were located in the Department of Automatic Control Systems.

In 2008 Russian Federation Order No. 1951 restructured military higher education and established the Voronezh Military Aviation Engineering University (VAIU). The order authorized the university 15,092 total civilian and military personnel. According to a May 2009 article, the university was expanding, with the cadet body growing from 4,800 to 6,500.

The restructured university includes two schools covering information security and information warfare. The VAIU website shows departments for Electronic Warfare and Electronic Warfare (Information Security). The five-year program in Electronic Warfare (Information Security) leads to designation as Specialist Data Protection for both military and “law enforcement agencies.” The web page content for the Department of Electronic Warfare (Information Security) is quite sparse compared to other department pages, which suggests that the material is sensitive. The extremely high ratio of staff to students—approximately 15,000 total staff and 6,000 students—is strange unless VAIU’s role goes beyond training junior officers.

There is also a Department of Electronic and Information Warfare at the Strategic Rocket Forces (SRF) Academy. The web page for Dr. Anatoly Horev, the head of the Department of Information Security at the Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology (MIET), states that he headed that SRF Academy department from 2001 to 2007.[87] However, published articles show the previous department head, Colonel Vladimir Novikov, speaking on information warfare at a Moscow think tank in 2001.

There is little information on the specialized electronic and information warfare ). Many, curriculum at VAIU and the SRF Academy. However, university-level training in various IT security specialties is taught at approximately 90 institutions (see the sidebar, including the prestigious Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (MIFI), train students sponsored by the security services and military. Indeed, MIFI’s Department of Information Security “participates in military-scientific and scientific research work on military topics.”

Information warfare’s softer side is addressed at the Military University in Moscow. According to a 2000 Krasnaya Zvezda article, the university’s Department of Foreign Military Information—formerly the Department of Special Propaganda—had reorganized to include information security material.[88]

RUSSIAN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (IT) SECURITY TRAINING

Russian IT security training was done by the security services from 1949 until the early 1990s. Traditional Russian universities, starting with the Russian State Humanities University (RSUH), began offering information security degrees in the late 1980s. In 1991 the Moscow State Engineering Physics Institute (MEPHI) began offering information security training under the Faculty of Applied Mathematics. In 1995 the security services formed a state