Inside Cyber Warfare - Jeffrey Carr [97]
Today the new favorites include Pravda.ru, Yoki.ru, Elektorat.info, and Politonlayn.ru, all published by Vadim Gorshenin, who is friendly with former United Russia PR chief Konstantin Kostin, deputy chief of the presidential staff’s Domestic Policy Administration since 2008.
In 2008, the Kremlin’s focus was more honed to monitoring rather than propaganda, and these efforts were primarily run from Gleb Paylovsky’s FEP and Vadim Goreshenin’s Pravda.ru.
Konstantin Kostin described the effort:
We are called upon to provide monitoring in social milieus and social networks—real ones rather than Internet ones—of what is topical to these milieus and present the results in a public field.
Two years ago, Maksim Zharov, one of the authors of Chronicles of Information Warfare, used to work for Nikita Ivanov, then deputy chief of the Administration for Interregional and Cultural Ties With Foreign Countries of the President’s Staff and supervisor of the pro-Kremlin youth movements (i.e., the Nashi). Zharov earlier published (through Yevropa) an instruction manual for bloggers who want to “fight the enemies of Russia” in the blogosphere.
Chronicles of Information Warfare
In spite of these shifts of interest on the part of the ruling party, Pavlovsky continues to be an influential voice in Russian politics as well as a human rights advocate. His organization created the Yevropa publishing house, the publisher of Chronicles of Information Warfare (English translation of the Russian name) by Maksim Sharov and Tomofey Shevyakov.
The book covers guidance provided by First Deputy Chief of Staff to the President of Russia and former GRU Intelligence Officer Vladislav Surkov. Surkov was also instrumental in creating official youth organizations such as Nashi that have played an important part in implementing Kremlin policy through a variety of methods, including hacking opponents’ computers.
Shortly after the Georgia conflict, Surkov held a closed-door conference with Russian spin doctors explaining how to use information as a weapon to fight Russia’s enemies (such as the government of Georgia). Those remarks have been captured by authors Sharov and Shevyakov as content for their book. The following is a quote from the introduction:
Net wars have always been an internal peculiarity of the Internet—and were of no interest to anyone in real life. The five-day war showed that the Net is a front just like the traditional media, and a front that is much faster to respond and much larger in scale. August 2008 was the starting point of the virtual reality of conflicts and the moment of recognition of the need to wage war in the information field too.
Analysis
Although the FEP is not a part of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, it is part of the official voice of the Kremlin and a key player in orchestrating a response to anti-Kremlin speech or actions against both internal and external opponents. Since cyber warfare is frequently categorized as information warfare, the FEP is an important, albeit little-known, organization to watch.
The FEP’s hand in designing or shaping strategies is a subtle one, and its influence is often disguised or misinterpreted as “crowdsourcing,” i.e., a seemingly spontaneous outburst of nationalistic cyber attacks. While there is a pile-on mentality once an Information Operation has been launched, attribution is often disguised through a technique known by stage magicians as misdirection.
“Wars of the Future Will Be Information Wars”
The National Forum of Information Security is an internationally sponsored annual event held in Moscow. “InfoForum-10,” as it was known in its February 2008 incarnation, featured a speech by Russian Deputy Chief of the General Staff Aleksandr Burutin entitled “Wars of the Future Will Be Information Wars.”[38]
Who is Alexandr Burutin?
According to Burutin’s biography at RussiaProfile.org, his appointment as a presidential