Inside Cyber Warfare - Jeffrey Carr [74]
In October 2007, another Russian youth movement known as The Eurasian Movement of the Youth (ESM) launched a DDoS attack against the president of Ukraine’s website, shutting it down for three days. Furthermore, both Nashi and the ESM participated in protests against the Estonian embassy in Moscow in May 2007.
The blog Windows on Eurasia (May 31, 2007) points to evidence that the FSB guides and encourages youth hackers such as the ESM to act on behalf of Russian government interests. For example, in early 2007, the ESM (http://www.axisglobe.com/article.asp?article=1419) threatened to disable the website of the Ukrainian Security Service:
ESM, the Russian radical youth organization that has been using sophisticated computer assets capable of disrupting a government computer network and eager to do so for political reasons, also vowed to disable the website of the Ukrainian Security Service (http://www.axisglobe.com/article.asp?article=444), SBU, in the near future, unless Yushchenko dismisses Valentyn Nalyvaychenko, SBU’s pro-NATO chief.
Russian journalist Andrei Soldatov wrote about the relationship between the FSB and Russian hackers in an article for Novaya Gazeta (May 31, 2007), beginning with Russian students from the Tomsk region attacking the Chechen news website KavkazCenter.com in 2002. Following the attack, the regional FSB office in Tomsk issued a special press release that said, “[T]he actions of the students do not contradict Russian law but rather is an expression of political orientation and worthy of respect” (Google translation from the Russian).
Soldatov also refers to the National Anti-terrorism Committee (NAC), which was established in 2006 by Vladmir Putin and chaired by Nikolay Patrushev, the director of the FSB, as having an interest in utilizing members of the Russian hacker community when it was in its interest to do so.
Sergei Markov, Estonia, and Nashi
On March 3, 2009, Sergei Markov, a state duma deputy and member of the Unified Russia party, participated in a panel discussion with Russian and US experts, including James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, about information warfare in the 21st century. During that discussion, Markov stunned everyone present by announcing that it was his assistant who started the Estonia cyber attacks in 2007. The following quote comes from Radio Free Europe, which broke the story on March 6, 2009, on its website:
“Markov, a political analyst who has long been one of Vladimir Putin’s glibbest defenders, went on to explain that this assistant happened to be in ‘one of the unrecognized republics’ during the dispute with Estonia and had decided on his own that ‘something bad had to be done to these fascists.’ So he went ahead and launched a cyberwar.
“‘Turns out it was purely a reaction from civil society,’ Markov reportedly said, adding ominously, ‘and, incidentally, such things will happen more and more.’”
Markov, a supporter of the Nashi youth movement, attended its second annual Innovation Forum on July 21, 2008—one day after the President of Georgia’s website came under a DDoS attack and 19 days before Russia’s invasion of Georgia.
A Three-Tier Model of Command and Control
It’s understandable to want to find a telltale piece of evidence that conclusively links the Kremlin with the actions of its hackers. However, it’s important to realize that in the anonymous workings of the Internet, such a goal is not only naive, but it also doesn’t accurately represent the relationships that have been built over the years between Russian politicians and organized youth associations.
The historical evidence presented in this chapter points to a three-tiered model (Figure 7-10) that establishes command and control by the Kremlin through Nashi and other groups whose membership includes hackers, resulting in an organized yet open call for unaffiliated hackers to join in. Russian organized crime provides a protected