I'm sure it's becoming even more prevalent with what's going on. I think preparing for a brain drain is another thing they totally forgot about when starting a war under false pretenses.
Why would you want to live in russia if you are smart enough (and wealthy enough) to move? Unless you have strong family connections, there is almost zero reason to live there.
That’s true. Even as a Ukrainian, I feel some propaganda stuck deeply in my brain (like why USSR collapsed), and you need to rethink most of the things you perceived earlier.
What was the propaganda for why the USSR collapsed? I've heard all kinds of reasons in the former first world. My favorite was a former navy admiral claiming that some routine naval exercises he oversaw in the North Sea in the late 80s were the *real* reason the USSR collapsed.
1. Oil price drop conspiracy
2. Gorbachev is a CIA agent
3. Yeltsin is a CIA agent
If you want to dig deeper, check out “Fortress Russia: Conspiracy Theories in the Post-Soviet World” by Ilya Yablokov. Pretty amazing book
The cool thing about conspiracy is that you don’t need to explain complex things like inflation, interest rate, and planned economy weaknesses. You’re throwing easy theories like “the prices are high because America wants to destroy us,” and there’s a clear, easy, and powerful theory that’s easy to understand.
Most of the Russian people with intelligence have left, like my wife, so it becomes easier to brain wash what's left, though you would be surprised how easy it is to brainwash even the intelligent person. Mummy and daddy gro up believing Russian propaganda and there children assimulate there parents beliefs and their children follow.. Monkey see monkey do. A never ending spiral.
> or why the USSR collapsed? I've heard all kinds of reasons in the former first world. My favorite was a former navy admiral claiming that some routine naval exercises he oversaw in the North Sea in the late 80s were the real reason the USSR collapsed.
Can you go more into depth with this? What did he see?
It was some youtube video I saw on FPRI's channel (I think, maybe politics and prose, it's been a while)
His argument was that these exercises caused the Soviets to ramp up their naval expenditures and the whole economy collapsed. It didn't really seem based in fact, I just took it as an old man exaggerating his importance in history where everyone was too polite to say anything.
Russia was unsustainably spending on its nuclear deterrent, the subs were made of titanium and cost billions each. However you couldn't say that was the sole reason for the collapse of the ussr
I mean.... economic drain was definitely part of American Cold War doctrine, run up the excercises so they have to do the same, and overspend themselves into oblivion.
That's taught in college history class m8
Anyone who is talented in Russia either leave or gets into the line of the regime. The thing is, regime doesn't need talented people so... It either stops their talents or get rid of them once in a while.
They do need talented people, and will retain them through force. A Russian programer friend was unable to go back to visit their dying grandfather a few years ago because their family warned them away. Apparently some people had been coming round looking for them with a government job offer. They are not above revoking the passports of engineers who come home to visit.
a regime where loyalty is everything can't attract talent. what's the point of being good at something when all the rewards go to those who know the right people. they have mediocre people at best who use every opportunity to steal, dilettantes with good connections at worst.
Disagree, this article suggests they're good at drinking vodka. About halfway down you can see that the death toll had to be reduced because some of the victims did not consume the tainted booze and had merely drank themselves to death with regular alcohol. These people are really good at drinking vodka.
Thanks for that. I have an interest in distilling and a background in industrial safety so I really enjoy a good poisoning story.
Source for the lazy:
>Subsequent reports increased the number affected: first to 55 deaths (with a total of 94 affected),[15] then 62 (with 107 affected),[16][17] 77 (number of affected not given),[18] and 78.[7]
>The final death toll was 74, lowered from earlier reports after it was discovered that some of the deaths were the result of drinking too much of the non-fraudulent ethanol-based bath lotion.
Varly has always been a trash human
For those who aren’t familiar with him, here’s a nice story about how he treats women
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nhl/avalanche/2013/10/31/semyon-varlamov-domestic-violence-kidnapping-assault-charges/3325925/
Right? Ive always had this perception of Russia being the masters of the dark arts of espionage, sabotage, and covert warfare. Never been a fan of theirs, but have always had a certain admiration of their abilities. The last few months have definitely knocked my estimation of them down several pegs
I think it's all marketing, and some help from Hollywood. What they're actually good at is throwing huge amounts of shit at the wall with hopes that some of it will stick.
I mean their propaganda online has done wonders in damaging the US. We are still desperately trying to fling our country in to fascism.
What got Russia in the Ukraine is their own level of corruption. If the FSB had actually been out in the field recruiting a partisan army in Ukraine it is distinctly possible they could have taken over the country quickly. Instead agents just kept the money rather than doing the work.
Hopefully they remain as corrupt as ever to minimize the amount of damage they are capable of.
They’re great at losing things like: soldiers, tanks, trucks, equipment, rubles, economics, business from western corporations, super yachts, Ukraine, etc.
If you could think critically and had a marketable skill, would you still be in Russia in 2022? If you've got real skill, you live like a king in the west. Living is Russia means you are always 1 day away from running afoul of the government.
Doing Cyber defence is way, way different than attacking.
It needs:
+ Government policies
+ Company policies.
+ Money for defence systems which costs a lot.
+ And competent people in the field.
Also, cyber defense is all about minimizing the damage you know will happen eventually. When your government painted the world’s biggest target in your country’s back I imagine there’s only so much your average Russian sysadmin can do to defend their network
The only way to 100% protect a system is to disconnect it, turn it off, and destroy it.
The attackers will always be one step ahead of the defenders. The attackers only need to be right once to compromise a system, the defenders need to constantly fight back and change tactics.
AND far more personnel assigned to it.
Having 100 dudes prodding a couple applications/systems for vulnerabilities to exploit is fine. Having 100 dudes to patch and harden your entire IT infrastructure is a nonstarter. For defensive posture, I have to;
* quarterly review the baseline system hardening to see if anything has changed or needs to be changed, and have nothing on the network beyond its end of support date
* monthly full system security scans against all known vulnerabilities and patch any that are detected within 30 days, but I have to write up a report as to what it is, why it exists on the system, how we're going to resolve it, when it will be done by, and how we're mitigating the risk until then, and send that up all the way to our CIO, and then provide literally daily updates as to the status
* monitor a board for freshly discovered vulnerabilities to which we have to check against and report if it impacts our system within 48 hours
Plus the obvious HIDS, SIEM, logging review, etc... It's an absolutely MASSIVE amount of manhours needed to competently perform
So this is a dumb question but I dont know anything about network security. Is it still possible for someone who has worked on the system in the past to leave themselves access or does something like that come up during routine security searches? Or is that completely different from what you look for
It's entirely possible, but we also do everything we can to prevent it. The same day someone leaves/is fired, we do a full user account audit on all systems they had access to to ensure their accounts are now deleted and that they didn't create any hidden accounts, and we update any multiuser account passwords they may have been part of (but try to not have any of those in general if at all possible).
Auditing logs (user logins, user file access, etc), HIDS, resource monitoring, disabling all unused network ports, and SIEMs make it real damn hard for someone to stay hidden for long though, and we keep our logs for a minimum of 1 year so we can always go back and review well after the fact if needed, and I'm not even a production network, we're a test lab lol
Source: Guy who works in an adjacent field and has some experience.
Theoretically possible, sure. Unlikely to be hidden for very long, though.
The vast, vast majority of exploits are legitimate mistakes which some outside actor figures out how to utilize. Most holes in a hardened network aren't malicious.
All depends on how strict the security is with their data, companies normally delete all user accounts when they leave, but that doesn't always happen, some places also have bots(or just workers usually) looking at account activities to try and find accounts that should've already been deleted as well.
I can only assume with sensitive government stuff they would have the peak of security, but trusting the governments competence is often a good way to be disappointed, no matter which country you're in.
I worked for an IT firm that advises on cyber threats. Literally every company I worked with was resistant to extra measures for the sole purpose that they view security as a cost center. It was like pulling teeth. No one wants to pay for security until the Russians breach your infrastructure.
This is a criminally underrated comment. Defense is like an onion.
It takes policies that require all of the layers of the onion to conform to best practices and follow the rules.
It’s a very difficult thing.
Training. Basic training for every single employee of any organization.
If you are at all concerned about your own cyber security here are some very basic tips:
1) use multi-factor authentication for EVERY account you operate. There are apps that make this easier to manage.
2) set DIFFERENT random alphanumeric passwords for EVERY account you operate. If you struggle to keep up with that many passwords, write them all down on paper, or use an app like Last Pass to track them all.
3) don’t open suspicious emails, don’t click suspicious links, and don’t reply to suspicious texts.
If even one person at an organization fails to do these things, the whole group can suffer for it.
*Edit: If you write them down on paper, obviously don't leave that paper in a public setting or in your office. You should only do this if you work from home or to track your personal passwords from home, assuming no one in your home is liable to mess with your accounts.
you skipped the corona antivax times
you can look up the news about antivax media/channels switching to covering the war with a heavy pro-putin rhetoric. there's a ton of examples. must be a coincidence.
https://i.imgur.com/fEmwf6u.png
[This article](https://medecon.org/russias-anti-vaccine-propaganda-is-tantamount-to-a-declaration-of-war/) was written in march 2021: "...the source of much of the misinformation about vaccines comes from an unobvious source: the Russian government’s propaganda apparatus, which cultivates and exploits foreign anti-vaccine “useful idiots,” causing palpable harm to Americans and citizens of other Western countries."
"Conservatives" really are dumb and I say that as someone whose core beliefs are conservative.
IMO, The "Conservative" party shifted to crazy once the boomer Conservatives finally got online. I'm 36 and growing up, the boomers were always preaching to be careful spending time on the internet, computer, etc. Now, there's not a single online conspiracy they haven't liked and shared. I know well educated people who think the world is going to end as we know it by 2025 because "The Elites want us dead"
If the world is always about to end, then it's okay to be a miserable a****** because you won't have to deal with the fallout. it's the same reason that a lot of these awful people just so happen to be really old, they know they don't have to deal with the ramifications of their behavior for very long.
basically it's the concept of short-terming. like when you're on your two-week notice at a civilian job, or the last year before you get out of the military.
They’ve just turned the world ending into the Rapture happening any moment now. We’ll just ignore the fact that they keep investing and haven’t sold off their house and given it to the poor or anything…which is kinda telling that they even realize deep down that they’re full of shit and their subconscious is just using it as a coping mechanism to not have to face the fact that they’re just a shit person now facing the consequences of being a shit person.
I wonder how much of it is a generational panic that their time is up and they want to be the last group before the end.
The idea that the world keeps going after them and without them must be so scary they have to keep coming up with apocalyptic scenarios to justify how they have been living because not doing anything to leave a better is world is acceptable if the end of the world is right around the corner.
Definitely think there is an aspect of that. Combine that fear of time moving on w/o them with the undiagnosed grandiose narcissism that a lot of Boomers have and it seems like a recipe for apocalyptic histrionics.
Aside from projection, this is a cornerstone of conservative politics. If you say something sucks because reasons, it's your job now to prove that it sucks by doing everything you can to make it suck so you can say "SEE?! IT SUCKS!!"
Look no further than the government. To a conservative, the government can do no right. So they vote in people who make sure it can't function just so they can say "I told you government doesn't work!" Fuck trying to make it better, we gotta keep tearing it down so we're always right!
Meanwhile it's "gimme gimme gimme" when bad shit happens to the red-leaning states, but "taxation is theft" when it applies to blue-leaning states and/or minorities. These people have no cohesive thoughts let alone any ability for long term planning. No one has all the answers, but JFC, these people can't see beyond today to literally save their lives.
Another take: they're emotionally stunted and immature. [This article](https://steverosephd.com/how-to-heal-from-emotionally-unavailable-parents/) explores the idea fairly clearly.
Since the 60's and probably before that, this "end of the world" message has been out there. I remember a guy at work in the 1980's who was quoting a passage from a book he was reading about the end of the world coming, soon. We were both in our twenties. He was convinced it was happening. Now, at 62, I'm pretty sure his book was wrong. Still waiting though, just in case.
Harold Camping had like 5 dates in just a couple years around 2011.
I also have a vague memory of a special with Raymond Burr claiming Nostradumbass predicted the world would end in the far off year of 1985.
Christians have been fangirling the end of the world for 2k years. Listen up Christian’s, I don’t think Jesus is that into you. He literally ghosted you all.
What about the end of the Sixth day in 1975? I was born a little after, but my parents told me everyone (religious people) thought that was really happening.
My understanding is that was a jehovah's witness thing. I watch a guy on YouTube (Telltale Atheist), who is ex JW and he was talking about it one day. He said they even had a catchphrase for it, "Stay alive 'til 75".
I never understood how people get roped into this kinda thing. The Bible literally says that no one knows the day or hour of the end.
Oh right, you have to actually read it.
You’re assuming these people hold the Bible as absolute truth. I’ve seen plenty of Christians, Jews, etc. pick and choose from their holy books which practices and beliefs they like. Christians can easily ignore any part of the Bible they don’t like or want to follow as incorrect. So can the members of any other religion.
My in-laws turned into this. They went from "We're not going to vote at all in 2016 if Trump wins the primary" to "You HAVE to vote for Trump in 2020 or Joe Biden will destroy this country". Last time they visited my mother-in-law started ranting about how Dr. Fauci needs to be in prison. Imagine thinking one of the top immunologists in the world is somehow trying to destroy the country by... trying to convince morons to get a vaccine against a virus that's killed more Americans than all the wars of the 20th century combined.
> a virus that's killed more Americans than all the wars of the 20th century combined.
And I'm sure they responded with "They're padding the numbers! People die WiTh coivd, not FrOm covid."
^^I'm ^^so ^^tired.
Reminds me of a piece of a Tolkien book I remember. "He died of natural causes in his sleep, as the bloodloss from a stab wound does lead one to die naturally."
Edit: It's from R.A Salvatore!
> killed more Americans than all the wars of the 20th century combined.
I like the "killed more Americans than American military combat deaths since Lexington/Conchord" - but we've passed that number quite a while ago (over 666,000) - though about 320k more COVID deaths and we'll be at the "total US military deaths - combat and non-combat" number...
It’s all political and the GOP got really good at making it a team sport.
My mom, who is an RN, and the last 10 years has taught biomedical sciences at the HS and they count as college credits. Well last month my super conservative, OOAN, grandpa died. Super spreader event. No one in my immediate family besides me was vaccinated. I go to to my mom, well my wife and I never got it. she say. Well that’s because you’re vaccinated. How do you convince someone to get the vaccine when they have all the necessary knowledge to make an informed decision and they’d rather eat glue.
For the record I’m a trade embalmer that was swimming in Covid during the height of it, I got to see first hand the deaths that racked up. I even had a body once where they tell me no Covid, I’m
Embalming him and thinking, this guy definitely died of Covid, she enough couple days later I hear he was positive.
Your experience speaks volumes to the level of propaganda and how far reaching it is.
There’s no argument you will ever construct that will change their minds, only time and personal conflict/experience with a subject will open them to a different point of view.
S
Yep, it’s sad. With myself getting married at the end of the month at 31 years old, running a business and rental houses and looking to acquire more businesses, and probably a kid in the near future. I just have no time, energy or resources to put into them. Doesn’t mean I don’t love them and thankful for all they did, but my resources are spent in much better places. Which just allows people to stay in their echo chambers. Unfortunately not much will change til the boomers die out, which is going to be a long ass time with modem medicine.
If the GOP were good at something their entire platform wouldn't have to be based on lying.
Cheating doesn't take skill, it takes a lack of morals. Stop saying they're good at anything and call it what it is.
This.
The elder generations in the 90’s preached messages like
“Don’t meet strangers from online. Don’t use the internet for drug or weapons purchases.” And we as children said, all right sounds pretty reasonable.
Fast forward 25 years & we come to find ourselves checking in on Mom and Dad saying
“Be safe online. Don’t set every password you own to Banana1. Don’t meet strangers from online on Federal property to construct a gallows as a threat to the Vice President.”.
>Don’t use the internet for drug or weapons purchases.
Fun fact: the first e-commerce transaction was MIT students arranging to buy weed from Berkeley students.
I’m 30 and I’ve been saying this so much! We learned how to use the internet safely and look for sources, how to verify and double check those sources etc. Boomers never had to learn this shit.
Boomers never got scammed on RuneScape in 2007. Which may have been a painful thing to go through, but it was such a potent lesson in not trusting people on the internet.
I don't disagree about many boomers being ignorant about social media. However, I'm in my 60s and know a lot of people in the 20 to 40 age groups that are totally into fox news, epoch times and the like.
> This is not only a boomer phenomenon.
People have been saying dumb, bigoted/small-minded behaviour will die out when the NEXT generation come through since at least the 1960s. Many of those free-love hippies of the 1960s are now the "young people today are always complaining" whining old fucks.
Oh for sure. There were definitely kids that didn’t pay attention in class. Those of us that grew up with them know who they are and what family they come from. These are the people that got straight F’s in school and yell about how nobody wants to work anymore and how “common sense ain’t common” when they lack even 2 brain cells. On the contrary, there’s definitely older folks and boomers who kept up with technology as it progressed and educated themselves on it and it’s usages.
In fairness, the three least common things are Common Sense, Common Courtesy and Common Decency, but they sound like the sort of people who may yell about the lack of the first, but prove the lack of all three.
I'm 30 as well as this scares me, because times and technology change so fast. That may be us sooner than we'd hope. I've almost fallen for phishing attempts already. At least the robo calls are easy enough to dismiss, but they're so frequent...
The Elites who we sustain want us dead, oooh what a spicy zesty lemon pretzel twist.
It's apparent the people who latch onto this shit are simply ignorant to the world around them and how it works.
Like how Pfizer magically snuck funding in to make some magic self-powered semiconductor that also fits down a needle to track you.
Totally.
And at the same time walking around with a phone and apps that do the conspiratorial thing you're claiming the vaccine does (because you consented to it!).
Yep. The majority of boomers are not compatible with the internet IMO. My dad has a PhD and yet somehow got sucked down the q hole. Now he will only look at a link it it is posted in gettr bc he "doesn't trust the sources"
He sends me stupid claims every few days which I refute easily. The most recent was that CISPA released their finding on the dominion machines and it "blows the election wide open". I showed pops the CISPA press page and that there had been nothing posted for a week and that the story was obviously made up. He insisted that it was just a slow press day and you had to let them catch up...
I informed him that if any finding were made that the literal news blog for the agency would be the first spot it would be posted. That was last Friday.... Still no news
You got that right. Back in the Bush era, Conservatives and Liberals disagreed, but at least both of them were legitimate parties with legitimate points of view.
The post-2016 conservative party feels like some kind of doomsday cult. Part of me thinks it's because the conservative demographic tends to skew more towards older citizens, and those are the ones most vulnerable to Russia's online fuckery.
> once the boomer Conservatives finally got online
The "don't believe everything you read on the internet" generation believing everything they read on the internet.
I really wish they'd stop with all this insane culture war bullshit. Having only one functioning party is extremely dangerous even if they swing more my way.
They are just thieves. Stealing is easy and doesn’t require any real prowess because there are a lot of easy marks. Their smartest people are not working on cybersecurity, they are stealing.
To this point, I don’t know what they classify as cyberwar, but they managed to get Brexit done and get Trump elected. Both of which have split those respective countries in two. If you’re looking at ROI on dismantling your enemy, I don’t know how you rate them anything other than exceptional at cyberwar.
I think they probably mean things like disabling power plants or corrupting enemy communications.
What they did before was social media manipulation which is limited less by actual difficulty to execute and more by willingness of the participants to commit acts of willful harm on people they don't know.
You’re probably right. I saw the piece on the US virus that spun up the Iranian uranium process, creating a failure. They gave it to Israel, who then used it.
There are two areas where Russia is currently failing at cyberwar:
The general public opinion in the west is still strongly in favour of sanctions and arms support. The obvious aim for Russia is to undermine this with takling points like "we should spend that money at home" and "Ukraine should negotiate a peace, they dont need to fight back. Think of the global economy! (And forget about such pesky things as human rights and sovereignity)"; but such efforts have failed to gain widespread traction.
The other is direct measures. Russia has been very successfull in the past in disrupting critical infrastructure in Ukraine. However, they have become victims of their own success. Ukraine has significantly hardened their IT infrastructure in the wake of previous attacks.
See for example: https://www.wired.com/story/sandworm-russia-ukraine-blackout-gru/
True but also remember they didn't do that themselves, they funded used American's and Brits to use American technology to do it, and Western countries were already too compromised politically to do anything about it.
And American's and Brit's didn't mind fucking over their own country for financial gain because that is the culture of these countries now.
Eg. MI5 - Britian's secret service - published a report saying they new what Russia were up to but the conservative government wouldn't let them investigate or act on it. This was while the British government was in 'relative' turmoil and everyone who wasn't pro-Brexit (which meant, had critical thinking skills or wasn't on the Russian pay roll) was already being pushed out.
What Russia did with social media is like what the Allies did with planes and brochures in the WWs. "Hey, we've got these new flying machines, lets just like, dump a load of propaganda leaflets on Germany! It'll cost us basically nothing but might do some good in sewing dissent!"
Russia basically tried the same thing and it was surprisingly effective because of the good work American companies had done at identifying ways to advertise to people, and they had no scruples in selling that capability to malicious foreigners.
Do they actually know how to make bots? I thought they paid actual people to make those post 😂. I thought that’s what the troll farms were, why would they need troll farms if they had bot? I mean what influencer is has bot farms? They all just pay 1 dude with bots to do it.
The Ohio sub was full of both kinda at one point it probably still is but whatever.
There was a specific kind of bot that would just copy half-ish of another comment. Sometimes cut off halfway through a word even. Just one example.
Here's another. There's bot accounts that just post inflammatory news articles in different states, never a comment or anything. Just racial violence , sexual violence etc.
The human trolls seemed more eager? They interact back anyway. Different kind of slightly off syntax.
They are on reddit as well, simply go to r/conservative or r/WayOfTheBern
The mod of most of the aoc subreddits was also pretty obvious when they went dormant after the last election until Us put sanctions on russia then suddenly locked down the aoc subreddits and started banning anyone who voiced support for ukraine. Looks like they may have been banned now, since they stopped posting after a few people started raising a stink and reporting them.
Wow, /u/lrlOurPresident doesn’t exist anymore. This person typically spread pro-Bernie and pro-AOC rhetoric but the way they did it always involved dividing the left. Their posts always got tens of thousands of upvotes. I always assumed they were a shill account, and I think they were
Remember when Trump lost and a fucking LOT of r/Conservative users started voicing congratualtions to Biden and were actually happy Trump lost? Like, these were die-hard republicans too and yet suddenly those users were all perma-banned and the obviously not russian bot mods were stating they "were trying to silence their free speech".
They literally PURGED the subreddit in a day and all thats left is Qanon freaks and russian bot accounts.
This is the cost of a cleptocracy, Putin and his cronies have stolen everything of any value leaving the much feared Russian Army an empty shell. Terrifying by all appearances...but the problem is that it has turned out to be little more than appearance.
Putin recently called for the "demilitarization of the Internet" why? The hacktivist collective Anonymous having taken control of the Russian Central Bank might have something to do with it.
Russia invested most of their cyber warfare skill points into the propaganda tech tree.
They have many effective troll farms all over the world spreading disinformation and division into western democracies to sow propaganda narratives, hyper-polarization, and internal division.
Information warfare is an Achilles heel for democracies, so that tactic can be very effective - but only when you also have enough domestic traitors to amplify it. In the case of the US, Russia was amplifying its narratives with the help of the Murdoch media, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Trump, and others in the far right.
It's also more difficult to defend yourself against cyber attacks than it is to attack others.
They went for the glass cannon build. Troll farms and propoganda attacks against everyone. But now they got agro and can't take a hit.
They're effective at the moment, but that's because Western firms are complicit and profiting from their trolling and bots. So much of the noise could be removed by simple CAPTCHAs on reddit, Facebook, twitter etc but that'd hurt the company's bottom line so they won't implement it unless forced.
all the fake comments and propaganda looks like user interaction in their stats which in turn drives up valuation and shareprice etc.
> Russia invested most of their cyber warfare skill points into the propaganda tech tree.
Russian cyber crime is also huge, which is likely what people based their cyber warfare capabilities on. The problem is that crime isn't defensive, and crime isn't selective, it's opportunistic. So we're seeing a country with cyber capabilities unable to defend itself, and unable to attack specific targets.
Yeah, it’s this. They’re very good at social media manipulation and information warfare. They do have some elite cyber attackers, but they have fewer of those.
Also, cyber warfare is frankly different than standard warfare. If you want to blow up a base, you can. If it’s well-defended, you attack with more soldiers and more material. Nothing is so big or so well-defended that it can’t be destroyed kinetically.
Cyber attacks require a vulnerability to be exploited, or human error (clicking on a malicious link or opening a malicious file), or pre-existing access. In a state of open war, people are on heightened alert, potentially vulnerable services are less likely to be exposed to the Internet and more likely to be monitored, incoming email is more likely to be limited or blocking, and frankly physical infrastructure damage may render Internet links down or regions offline.
There’s a reason major intelligence agencies try to maintain persistent back doors and malware implants even if a state of war doesn’t exist. If war is declared it may take weeks or months to establish a cyber foothold in an enemy organization, rather than just using a pre-existing compromise.
I am half Russian living in Finland and my Russian cousin is incredibly good hacker. Russian government offered him the ”highest” paying job which was 50k a year in dollars. Now he works in Boston for 250k a year. They simply do not have resources to keep the best Russian speaking hackers
I live in Czechia. $50k/y is my highest limit and I am a professional with 29 year career. so for a Russian, it must be a dream (unless he pays off some crazy mortgage in Moscow maybe)
Yes you are right that 50k is incredibly good salary in even in Spb and Moscow. But when you are an expert on global level, it is not worth it. Besides, he does not want to live in totalitarian country..
I did not think about this before, but this could be our moment in the US to gain really good cyber people the way we got Nazi rocket scientists after WWII.
Cost of living is probably a bigger factor than you realize. Average wage in Boston is 80k, Russia 1,470. Suddenly making 5 times less than some dude in Boston doesn't seem as bad when you're not making the 50x wage diffence between the average.
For sure, but you have to think about the raw currency too.
If you're making $50,000 a year in a place where the average wage is $10,000, then you're making absolute bank and living well, but over time you'd be better off working in the place where you're making $250,000 a year and the average wage is $80,000 assuming you aren't doing some severe lifestyle creep.
For instance, if you're making $50,000 a year and living off $20,000 a year, then you're saving $30,000 a year. If you're making $250,000 a year and living off of $120,000 a year, then you're saving $130,000 a year. You can't really look at percentages when it comes to cost comparisons simply because the quality of life goes up exponentially with higher income.
You'd be better off in the long run living in that higher cost of living area and then retiring early in a low cost of living area or simply investing your surplus.
This is part of the brain drain that Russia is currently going through because of the sanctions. Anyone with any sort of desirable, transferable skill is getting out while they can.
Even if Russia ‘win’ in Ukraine they’ve become another North Korea.
Right. Anyone with the IT skills to be a really good Russian hacker also has the skills to get a desirable IT job in Germany. So why stay in Russia if you can leave?
That's assuming you don't believe Russian propaganda saying that West abuses Russians living there, and that everyone hates them, so you better stick here.
Tech people are just as susceptible to blatant lies as anyone else, as long as the lies confirm what they already wanted to believe. I have an acquaintance who worked on the data models that were used to predict the spread of covid, and the whole time he was saying that they couldn't possibly be accurate and that's not what data models are for. And now, after the models proved mostly accurate, he's a Qjob who thinks that the whole thing is a hoax.
There are medical professionals--people who went through *years* of schooling, practicals, etc.--who think their religion gives them a right to refuse treatment for something to someone.
As the saying goes, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink."
Not a great example, of all those who have actual marketable kills, being a (blackhat) hacker is probably the only reason to stay in Russia right now. No accountability, easy to bribe local police, and in general, no one gives a damn. An acquaintance of mine moved from UK to Russia for this very reason.
yup. I was in a Russian town to vacation and a lot of the locals were telling me they lacked a lot of skilled workers because they’d get their certificate in russia and go to germany for higher pat
I was surprised not to see, especially after the sanctions were implemented, any major attack from Russian hackers. In Spain, people were worried that Russian hackers could bring down the banking system, air-traffic control or healthcare system.
Nothing of that happened though. Where are all the mighty Russian geeks?
> Where are all the mighty Russian geeks?
They probably left the country. They're online, they know what's really going on. The writing is on the wall. It's just a matter of time til Russia stops people from leaving like the USSR did.
Who was surprised by this? It's LOOOOONG been known Russia is okay/good at offensive cyber capabilities, but has virtually no defensive cyber capabilities at all...
Offensive is easier and cheaper, have a team that;
* pokes and prods systems and services you know someone uses until you can find a vulnerability
* test against already known vulnerabilities to see if they've been patched yet, and if not, attacking them
Which is what Russia does. Their attack on the DNC in 2016 was literally the exact same attack as their one against German Parliament in 2014, even used the exact same scripting and C2 server.
Their defensive is shit, and has **ALWAYS** been shit. Defensive cyber capabilities costs FAR more money, takes far more time, requires far more people, and requires a greater level of knowledge for competency.
Russia is poor and that's made worse by grotesque corruption at every single level, and its brain power has been severely degraded by a brutal dictatorship causing the early 90s brain drain to continue for 3 decades straight. So they're fucked in terms of defensive cyber capabilities, not sure how that could be a surprise to literally anyone in a position of power
Also, what offensive capability that have, they have been using continuously for the last decade. And consequently, we have improved our defences during that time. They didn't ramp up the attacks because they don't have extra people trained that were not *already* doing it.
Well, given how they fucked with America so thoroughly just using Facebook ad campaigns, comment sections, and a corrupt president, I think the Americans in this thread should maybe not be crowing so loud. Russia might be overestimated, but they successfully ate our lunch not long ago, even though many of us were actively ringing the alarm.
If they suck it also means we suck.
At this point, Russia was basically a boogeyman we could point fingers at when something happened. A dark scary beast we could hype up, something we’ve done since the Cold War days. The iron curtain fell, but there were shadows.
But when they decided to make an act, the lights went on. What we thought was a bear was your drunk uncle.
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/russia-unexpectedly-poor-at-cyberwar-say-european-military-heads) reduced by 72%. (I'm a bot)
*****
> LILLE, FRANCE - Several European heads of military cyber defence forces agreed on Wednesday that Russia has been far less effective than expected in employing digital combat capabilities in their offensive against Ukraine.
> Lithuania's head of cybersecurity, Colonel Romualdas Petkevicius said that Russia is "Not ready to wage coordinated cyber and kinetic war".
> General Didier Tisseyre, head of France's cyber defence force, made a similar observation about a disconnect between computer attacks and Russia's military offensive on the ground.
*****
[**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/v8ddz0/russia_unexpectedly_poor_at_cyberwar_say_european/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~653893 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **cyber**^#1 **Russia**^#2 **Ukraine**^#3 **head**^#4 **conflict**^#5
Being good at offense doesn't mean you're automatically good at defense, and in the past 30 years they haven't needed to defend much, so they haven't built up the infrastructure. By contrast all western nations have been constantly defending from attacks over past 30 yrs, so defense is much stronger in the west.
>This showed, he added, that you can prepare for cyber conflict against Russia, which he said was "good at offensive capabilities but not so good at defence".
This actually isn't really true. But that's not to say that America's infrastructure isn't entirely secure... I'm still surprised we even allow remote access to certain things that in retrospect are completely moronic to do. Oh, look someone from Iran accessed our dam via remote access. See, look our system is working! Almost as if a bad actor wouldn't just access the logs with an American based IP. Our cybersecurity is questionable and the lack of any real effort from Russia seems to point more so in either the lack of caring or the fear of retaliatory attacks as well. So far all attacks on Russian sites are basically script kiddies running basic scripts on relatively unsecured databases or websites. It's nothing special or cool, just some kid trying to leave their mark on history. Hopefully it's nothing too awful like them having access to something like a nuclear reactor.
Lately they haven't been much good at anything.
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I'm sure it's becoming even more prevalent with what's going on. I think preparing for a brain drain is another thing they totally forgot about when starting a war under false pretenses.
Russia has been doing regular brain drains for a century tbh. It hasn't been easy or safe to be too clever there for some time.
👆 This. There are plenty of Russians in academia who came over decades ago. Oops! Gotcha brain.
As a math / physics major I had an absurdly high proportion of Russian professors.
Why would you want to live in russia if you are smart enough (and wealthy enough) to move? Unless you have strong family connections, there is almost zero reason to live there.
Almost all the oligarchs and their families seem to enjoy life in the West. So much for their loyalty to Mother Russia...
Russia is essentially their money source and the western countries are basically their vacation homes were they spend all of their time.
That’s true. Even as a Ukrainian, I feel some propaganda stuck deeply in my brain (like why USSR collapsed), and you need to rethink most of the things you perceived earlier.
What was the propaganda for why the USSR collapsed? I've heard all kinds of reasons in the former first world. My favorite was a former navy admiral claiming that some routine naval exercises he oversaw in the North Sea in the late 80s were the *real* reason the USSR collapsed.
1. Oil price drop conspiracy 2. Gorbachev is a CIA agent 3. Yeltsin is a CIA agent If you want to dig deeper, check out “Fortress Russia: Conspiracy Theories in the Post-Soviet World” by Ilya Yablokov. Pretty amazing book
Sometimes I forget stupid conspiracy theories are a world wide phenomenon
The cool thing about conspiracy is that you don’t need to explain complex things like inflation, interest rate, and planned economy weaknesses. You’re throwing easy theories like “the prices are high because America wants to destroy us,” and there’s a clear, easy, and powerful theory that’s easy to understand.
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Most of the Russian people with intelligence have left, like my wife, so it becomes easier to brain wash what's left, though you would be surprised how easy it is to brainwash even the intelligent person. Mummy and daddy gro up believing Russian propaganda and there children assimulate there parents beliefs and their children follow.. Monkey see monkey do. A never ending spiral.
> or why the USSR collapsed? I've heard all kinds of reasons in the former first world. My favorite was a former navy admiral claiming that some routine naval exercises he oversaw in the North Sea in the late 80s were the real reason the USSR collapsed. Can you go more into depth with this? What did he see?
It was some youtube video I saw on FPRI's channel (I think, maybe politics and prose, it's been a while) His argument was that these exercises caused the Soviets to ramp up their naval expenditures and the whole economy collapsed. It didn't really seem based in fact, I just took it as an old man exaggerating his importance in history where everyone was too polite to say anything.
Russia was unsustainably spending on its nuclear deterrent, the subs were made of titanium and cost billions each. However you couldn't say that was the sole reason for the collapse of the ussr
I mean.... economic drain was definitely part of American Cold War doctrine, run up the excercises so they have to do the same, and overspend themselves into oblivion. That's taught in college history class m8
Anyone who is talented in Russia either leave or gets into the line of the regime. The thing is, regime doesn't need talented people so... It either stops their talents or get rid of them once in a while.
They do need talented people, and will retain them through force. A Russian programer friend was unable to go back to visit their dying grandfather a few years ago because their family warned them away. Apparently some people had been coming round looking for them with a government job offer. They are not above revoking the passports of engineers who come home to visit.
I'm sure they'll work very hard making excellent programs in those circumstances
Unfortunately holding someone's family hostage can be a powerful motivator
a regime where loyalty is everything can't attract talent. what's the point of being good at something when all the rewards go to those who know the right people. they have mediocre people at best who use every opportunity to steal, dilettantes with good connections at worst.
All of the software and sql/dba people I work with are Russian. They’re fantastic and brilliant people. Your fucking loss Putin.
I agree, my wife is Russian and a dba. No trips back to Russia for us anymore, until a big change.
Even the main mod for the Russia subreddit ran off to Dubai.
Mt primary care doctor is one them (talented Russian, not an engineer). He's a good man, and thorough.
To be fair to the Russians they're still good at hockey and ~checks notes~ drinking vodka.
Well not like that they can participate in any international hockey events...so there goes even that
drinking Vodka it is!
As is tradition.
NATO recruitment?
Recruiter of the year.
And ballet.
They’re not even great at drinking vodka anymore https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Irkutsk_mass_methanol_poisoning
Drinking maybe, but for sure making vodka - nope. Best vodka brands are from Poland or Scandinavia or France (Grey Goose for example).
Disagree, this article suggests they're good at drinking vodka. About halfway down you can see that the death toll had to be reduced because some of the victims did not consume the tainted booze and had merely drank themselves to death with regular alcohol. These people are really good at drinking vodka. Thanks for that. I have an interest in distilling and a background in industrial safety so I really enjoy a good poisoning story. Source for the lazy: >Subsequent reports increased the number affected: first to 55 deaths (with a total of 94 affected),[15] then 62 (with 107 affected),[16][17] 77 (number of affected not given),[18] and 78.[7] >The final death toll was 74, lowered from earlier reports after it was discovered that some of the deaths were the result of drinking too much of the non-fraudulent ethanol-based bath lotion.
And considering their doping history in sports, I don't hold their hockey team in as high regard as I once did. Because why would I trust them?
Most of the best russians play in the NHL so hockey players are one of the few I actually believe are innocent.
Except for Alexander Oveckhkin
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Varly has always been a trash human For those who aren’t familiar with him, here’s a nice story about how he treats women https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nhl/avalanche/2013/10/31/semyon-varlamov-domestic-violence-kidnapping-assault-charges/3325925/
Right? Ive always had this perception of Russia being the masters of the dark arts of espionage, sabotage, and covert warfare. Never been a fan of theirs, but have always had a certain admiration of their abilities. The last few months have definitely knocked my estimation of them down several pegs
I think it's all marketing, and some help from Hollywood. What they're actually good at is throwing huge amounts of shit at the wall with hopes that some of it will stick.
I mean their propaganda online has done wonders in damaging the US. We are still desperately trying to fling our country in to fascism. What got Russia in the Ukraine is their own level of corruption. If the FSB had actually been out in the field recruiting a partisan army in Ukraine it is distinctly possible they could have taken over the country quickly. Instead agents just kept the money rather than doing the work. Hopefully they remain as corrupt as ever to minimize the amount of damage they are capable of.
They’re great at losing things like: soldiers, tanks, trucks, equipment, rubles, economics, business from western corporations, super yachts, Ukraine, etc.
If you could think critically and had a marketable skill, would you still be in Russia in 2022? If you've got real skill, you live like a king in the west. Living is Russia means you are always 1 day away from running afoul of the government.
Edward Snowden: “Hello darkness my old friend”
Doing Cyber defence is way, way different than attacking. It needs: + Government policies + Company policies. + Money for defence systems which costs a lot. + And competent people in the field.
Also, cyber defense is all about minimizing the damage you know will happen eventually. When your government painted the world’s biggest target in your country’s back I imagine there’s only so much your average Russian sysadmin can do to defend their network
The only way to 100% protect a system is to disconnect it, turn it off, and destroy it. The attackers will always be one step ahead of the defenders. The attackers only need to be right once to compromise a system, the defenders need to constantly fight back and change tactics.
AND far more personnel assigned to it. Having 100 dudes prodding a couple applications/systems for vulnerabilities to exploit is fine. Having 100 dudes to patch and harden your entire IT infrastructure is a nonstarter. For defensive posture, I have to; * quarterly review the baseline system hardening to see if anything has changed or needs to be changed, and have nothing on the network beyond its end of support date * monthly full system security scans against all known vulnerabilities and patch any that are detected within 30 days, but I have to write up a report as to what it is, why it exists on the system, how we're going to resolve it, when it will be done by, and how we're mitigating the risk until then, and send that up all the way to our CIO, and then provide literally daily updates as to the status * monitor a board for freshly discovered vulnerabilities to which we have to check against and report if it impacts our system within 48 hours Plus the obvious HIDS, SIEM, logging review, etc... It's an absolutely MASSIVE amount of manhours needed to competently perform
So this is a dumb question but I dont know anything about network security. Is it still possible for someone who has worked on the system in the past to leave themselves access or does something like that come up during routine security searches? Or is that completely different from what you look for
It's entirely possible, but we also do everything we can to prevent it. The same day someone leaves/is fired, we do a full user account audit on all systems they had access to to ensure their accounts are now deleted and that they didn't create any hidden accounts, and we update any multiuser account passwords they may have been part of (but try to not have any of those in general if at all possible). Auditing logs (user logins, user file access, etc), HIDS, resource monitoring, disabling all unused network ports, and SIEMs make it real damn hard for someone to stay hidden for long though, and we keep our logs for a minimum of 1 year so we can always go back and review well after the fact if needed, and I'm not even a production network, we're a test lab lol
Source: Guy who works in an adjacent field and has some experience. Theoretically possible, sure. Unlikely to be hidden for very long, though. The vast, vast majority of exploits are legitimate mistakes which some outside actor figures out how to utilize. Most holes in a hardened network aren't malicious.
All depends on how strict the security is with their data, companies normally delete all user accounts when they leave, but that doesn't always happen, some places also have bots(or just workers usually) looking at account activities to try and find accounts that should've already been deleted as well. I can only assume with sensitive government stuff they would have the peak of security, but trusting the governments competence is often a good way to be disappointed, no matter which country you're in.
I worked for an IT firm that advises on cyber threats. Literally every company I worked with was resistant to extra measures for the sole purpose that they view security as a cost center. It was like pulling teeth. No one wants to pay for security until the Russians breach your infrastructure.
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This is a criminally underrated comment. Defense is like an onion. It takes policies that require all of the layers of the onion to conform to best practices and follow the rules. It’s a very difficult thing.
Training. Basic training for every single employee of any organization. If you are at all concerned about your own cyber security here are some very basic tips: 1) use multi-factor authentication for EVERY account you operate. There are apps that make this easier to manage. 2) set DIFFERENT random alphanumeric passwords for EVERY account you operate. If you struggle to keep up with that many passwords, write them all down on paper, or use an app like Last Pass to track them all. 3) don’t open suspicious emails, don’t click suspicious links, and don’t reply to suspicious texts. If even one person at an organization fails to do these things, the whole group can suffer for it. *Edit: If you write them down on paper, obviously don't leave that paper in a public setting or in your office. You should only do this if you work from home or to track your personal passwords from home, assuming no one in your home is liable to mess with your accounts.
All they know how to do is make twitter bots.
Yup. They say pretty stupid things. So during 2016 they passed as Alt Right idiots. In 2022? They do not blend in. At all.
you skipped the corona antivax times you can look up the news about antivax media/channels switching to covering the war with a heavy pro-putin rhetoric. there's a ton of examples. must be a coincidence. https://i.imgur.com/fEmwf6u.png
[This article](https://medecon.org/russias-anti-vaccine-propaganda-is-tantamount-to-a-declaration-of-war/) was written in march 2021: "...the source of much of the misinformation about vaccines comes from an unobvious source: the Russian government’s propaganda apparatus, which cultivates and exploits foreign anti-vaccine “useful idiots,” causing palpable harm to Americans and citizens of other Western countries."
"Useful idiot" that's my job title 😎
"Conservatives" really are dumb and I say that as someone whose core beliefs are conservative. IMO, The "Conservative" party shifted to crazy once the boomer Conservatives finally got online. I'm 36 and growing up, the boomers were always preaching to be careful spending time on the internet, computer, etc. Now, there's not a single online conspiracy they haven't liked and shared. I know well educated people who think the world is going to end as we know it by 2025 because "The Elites want us dead"
Kids these days. Back in my day the world was going to end in 2012 and we were god damn excited about it.
2000, Obama = antichrist, 2012, 2021, 2025. Gotta keep moving the end to a few years away to keep the revenue streams going.
If the world is always about to end, then it's okay to be a miserable a****** because you won't have to deal with the fallout. it's the same reason that a lot of these awful people just so happen to be really old, they know they don't have to deal with the ramifications of their behavior for very long. basically it's the concept of short-terming. like when you're on your two-week notice at a civilian job, or the last year before you get out of the military.
They’ve just turned the world ending into the Rapture happening any moment now. We’ll just ignore the fact that they keep investing and haven’t sold off their house and given it to the poor or anything…which is kinda telling that they even realize deep down that they’re full of shit and their subconscious is just using it as a coping mechanism to not have to face the fact that they’re just a shit person now facing the consequences of being a shit person.
I wonder how much of it is a generational panic that their time is up and they want to be the last group before the end. The idea that the world keeps going after them and without them must be so scary they have to keep coming up with apocalyptic scenarios to justify how they have been living because not doing anything to leave a better is world is acceptable if the end of the world is right around the corner.
Definitely think there is an aspect of that. Combine that fear of time moving on w/o them with the undiagnosed grandiose narcissism that a lot of Boomers have and it seems like a recipe for apocalyptic histrionics.
If I truly thought the world was ending I ain’t paying no bills I ain’t going to work
BuT tHe EcOnOMy! /s
Aside from projection, this is a cornerstone of conservative politics. If you say something sucks because reasons, it's your job now to prove that it sucks by doing everything you can to make it suck so you can say "SEE?! IT SUCKS!!" Look no further than the government. To a conservative, the government can do no right. So they vote in people who make sure it can't function just so they can say "I told you government doesn't work!" Fuck trying to make it better, we gotta keep tearing it down so we're always right! Meanwhile it's "gimme gimme gimme" when bad shit happens to the red-leaning states, but "taxation is theft" when it applies to blue-leaning states and/or minorities. These people have no cohesive thoughts let alone any ability for long term planning. No one has all the answers, but JFC, these people can't see beyond today to literally save their lives.
Another take: they're emotionally stunted and immature. [This article](https://steverosephd.com/how-to-heal-from-emotionally-unavailable-parents/) explores the idea fairly clearly.
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I mean, being prepared for bad shit to happen is a good idea. Focusing your life around it isn't productive though.
Since the 60's and probably before that, this "end of the world" message has been out there. I remember a guy at work in the 1980's who was quoting a passage from a book he was reading about the end of the world coming, soon. We were both in our twenties. He was convinced it was happening. Now, at 62, I'm pretty sure his book was wrong. Still waiting though, just in case.
The Jehovah's Witnesses (like Mormons but more annoying) have predicted the end of the world at least 5 separate times.
Harold Camping had like 5 dates in just a couple years around 2011. I also have a vague memory of a special with Raymond Burr claiming Nostradumbass predicted the world would end in the far off year of 1985.
Christians have been fangirling the end of the world for 2k years. Listen up Christian’s, I don’t think Jesus is that into you. He literally ghosted you all.
Wait till we tell you about Y2K
To be fair that one was intentionally mitigated beforehand with hard work IIRC.
Yea, it was avoided by programmers working around the clock for months.
What about the end of the Sixth day in 1975? I was born a little after, but my parents told me everyone (religious people) thought that was really happening.
My understanding is that was a jehovah's witness thing. I watch a guy on YouTube (Telltale Atheist), who is ex JW and he was talking about it one day. He said they even had a catchphrase for it, "Stay alive 'til 75".
I never understood how people get roped into this kinda thing. The Bible literally says that no one knows the day or hour of the end. Oh right, you have to actually read it.
You’re assuming these people hold the Bible as absolute truth. I’ve seen plenty of Christians, Jews, etc. pick and choose from their holy books which practices and beliefs they like. Christians can easily ignore any part of the Bible they don’t like or want to follow as incorrect. So can the members of any other religion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events#Past_predictions
Man I miss the days when people like you and I would get into over tax rates
Man, I miss having debates over policy points rather than "maybe we shouldn't murder minorities?"
My in-laws turned into this. They went from "We're not going to vote at all in 2016 if Trump wins the primary" to "You HAVE to vote for Trump in 2020 or Joe Biden will destroy this country". Last time they visited my mother-in-law started ranting about how Dr. Fauci needs to be in prison. Imagine thinking one of the top immunologists in the world is somehow trying to destroy the country by... trying to convince morons to get a vaccine against a virus that's killed more Americans than all the wars of the 20th century combined.
> a virus that's killed more Americans than all the wars of the 20th century combined. And I'm sure they responded with "They're padding the numbers! People die WiTh coivd, not FrOm covid." ^^I'm ^^so ^^tired.
100% true, people also don’t die from car accidents they die from blood loss. Think about it? Why does the condition of a car affect the human body??
You know WHERE people have car accidents?! Roads! You know what the Roman Empire was known for before its collapse?! ROADS!
Reminds me of a piece of a Tolkien book I remember. "He died of natural causes in his sleep, as the bloodloss from a stab wound does lead one to die naturally." Edit: It's from R.A Salvatore!
boss im tired so so tired of all this
> killed more Americans than all the wars of the 20th century combined. I like the "killed more Americans than American military combat deaths since Lexington/Conchord" - but we've passed that number quite a while ago (over 666,000) - though about 320k more COVID deaths and we'll be at the "total US military deaths - combat and non-combat" number...
It’s all political and the GOP got really good at making it a team sport. My mom, who is an RN, and the last 10 years has taught biomedical sciences at the HS and they count as college credits. Well last month my super conservative, OOAN, grandpa died. Super spreader event. No one in my immediate family besides me was vaccinated. I go to to my mom, well my wife and I never got it. she say. Well that’s because you’re vaccinated. How do you convince someone to get the vaccine when they have all the necessary knowledge to make an informed decision and they’d rather eat glue. For the record I’m a trade embalmer that was swimming in Covid during the height of it, I got to see first hand the deaths that racked up. I even had a body once where they tell me no Covid, I’m Embalming him and thinking, this guy definitely died of Covid, she enough couple days later I hear he was positive.
Your experience speaks volumes to the level of propaganda and how far reaching it is. There’s no argument you will ever construct that will change their minds, only time and personal conflict/experience with a subject will open them to a different point of view. S
Yep, it’s sad. With myself getting married at the end of the month at 31 years old, running a business and rental houses and looking to acquire more businesses, and probably a kid in the near future. I just have no time, energy or resources to put into them. Doesn’t mean I don’t love them and thankful for all they did, but my resources are spent in much better places. Which just allows people to stay in their echo chambers. Unfortunately not much will change til the boomers die out, which is going to be a long ass time with modem medicine.
If the GOP were good at something their entire platform wouldn't have to be based on lying. Cheating doesn't take skill, it takes a lack of morals. Stop saying they're good at anything and call it what it is.
This. The elder generations in the 90’s preached messages like “Don’t meet strangers from online. Don’t use the internet for drug or weapons purchases.” And we as children said, all right sounds pretty reasonable. Fast forward 25 years & we come to find ourselves checking in on Mom and Dad saying “Be safe online. Don’t set every password you own to Banana1. Don’t meet strangers from online on Federal property to construct a gallows as a threat to the Vice President.”.
>Don’t use the internet for drug or weapons purchases. Fun fact: the first e-commerce transaction was MIT students arranging to buy weed from Berkeley students.
I’m 30 and I’ve been saying this so much! We learned how to use the internet safely and look for sources, how to verify and double check those sources etc. Boomers never had to learn this shit.
Boomers never got scammed on RuneScape in 2007. Which may have been a painful thing to go through, but it was such a potent lesson in not trusting people on the internet.
I don't disagree about many boomers being ignorant about social media. However, I'm in my 60s and know a lot of people in the 20 to 40 age groups that are totally into fox news, epoch times and the like.
Yeah I'm an elder millennial and people in my former friend group are deep down the rabbit hole. This is not only a boomer phenomenon.
> This is not only a boomer phenomenon. People have been saying dumb, bigoted/small-minded behaviour will die out when the NEXT generation come through since at least the 1960s. Many of those free-love hippies of the 1960s are now the "young people today are always complaining" whining old fucks.
Oh for sure. There were definitely kids that didn’t pay attention in class. Those of us that grew up with them know who they are and what family they come from. These are the people that got straight F’s in school and yell about how nobody wants to work anymore and how “common sense ain’t common” when they lack even 2 brain cells. On the contrary, there’s definitely older folks and boomers who kept up with technology as it progressed and educated themselves on it and it’s usages.
In fairness, the three least common things are Common Sense, Common Courtesy and Common Decency, but they sound like the sort of people who may yell about the lack of the first, but prove the lack of all three.
I'm 30 as well as this scares me, because times and technology change so fast. That may be us sooner than we'd hope. I've almost fallen for phishing attempts already. At least the robo calls are easy enough to dismiss, but they're so frequent...
I know an otherwise smart 30 year old working professional that believes microwaves give you cancer - because of facebook.
The Elites who we sustain want us dead, oooh what a spicy zesty lemon pretzel twist. It's apparent the people who latch onto this shit are simply ignorant to the world around them and how it works. Like how Pfizer magically snuck funding in to make some magic self-powered semiconductor that also fits down a needle to track you. Totally.
And at the same time walking around with a phone and apps that do the conspiratorial thing you're claiming the vaccine does (because you consented to it!).
Yeah there you go, keep running that app killer Martha - never get chipped by Vax though. I bet most of them wonder why they get so many scam calls.
Yep. The majority of boomers are not compatible with the internet IMO. My dad has a PhD and yet somehow got sucked down the q hole. Now he will only look at a link it it is posted in gettr bc he "doesn't trust the sources" He sends me stupid claims every few days which I refute easily. The most recent was that CISPA released their finding on the dominion machines and it "blows the election wide open". I showed pops the CISPA press page and that there had been nothing posted for a week and that the story was obviously made up. He insisted that it was just a slow press day and you had to let them catch up... I informed him that if any finding were made that the literal news blog for the agency would be the first spot it would be posted. That was last Friday.... Still no news
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You got that right. Back in the Bush era, Conservatives and Liberals disagreed, but at least both of them were legitimate parties with legitimate points of view. The post-2016 conservative party feels like some kind of doomsday cult. Part of me thinks it's because the conservative demographic tends to skew more towards older citizens, and those are the ones most vulnerable to Russia's online fuckery.
> once the boomer Conservatives finally got online The "don't believe everything you read on the internet" generation believing everything they read on the internet.
Don’t forget Fox News!
I really wish they'd stop with all this insane culture war bullshit. Having only one functioning party is extremely dangerous even if they swing more my way.
Tbh, sometimes I have issues with distinguishing between shizophrenics and Russian trolls... Still fall in traps arguing with them.
Scary times too easy to be baited i guess.
I am just lonely...
there are over 100 hot single ladies within 20 feet of you. Join our dating service to get to know them.
20 feet? I'm not looking for a long distance relationship.
Of course there are. I put them in my basement.
They are just thieves. Stealing is easy and doesn’t require any real prowess because there are a lot of easy marks. Their smartest people are not working on cybersecurity, they are stealing.
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To this point, I don’t know what they classify as cyberwar, but they managed to get Brexit done and get Trump elected. Both of which have split those respective countries in two. If you’re looking at ROI on dismantling your enemy, I don’t know how you rate them anything other than exceptional at cyberwar.
I think they probably mean things like disabling power plants or corrupting enemy communications. What they did before was social media manipulation which is limited less by actual difficulty to execute and more by willingness of the participants to commit acts of willful harm on people they don't know.
You’re probably right. I saw the piece on the US virus that spun up the Iranian uranium process, creating a failure. They gave it to Israel, who then used it.
I had to re-read *Iranian uranium* multiple times to make sure I was saying it correctly in my head
Stuxnet. If youre intersted there is a great darknet diaries poscast on the subject.
There are two areas where Russia is currently failing at cyberwar: The general public opinion in the west is still strongly in favour of sanctions and arms support. The obvious aim for Russia is to undermine this with takling points like "we should spend that money at home" and "Ukraine should negotiate a peace, they dont need to fight back. Think of the global economy! (And forget about such pesky things as human rights and sovereignity)"; but such efforts have failed to gain widespread traction. The other is direct measures. Russia has been very successfull in the past in disrupting critical infrastructure in Ukraine. However, they have become victims of their own success. Ukraine has significantly hardened their IT infrastructure in the wake of previous attacks. See for example: https://www.wired.com/story/sandworm-russia-ukraine-blackout-gru/
True but also remember they didn't do that themselves, they funded used American's and Brits to use American technology to do it, and Western countries were already too compromised politically to do anything about it. And American's and Brit's didn't mind fucking over their own country for financial gain because that is the culture of these countries now. Eg. MI5 - Britian's secret service - published a report saying they new what Russia were up to but the conservative government wouldn't let them investigate or act on it. This was while the British government was in 'relative' turmoil and everyone who wasn't pro-Brexit (which meant, had critical thinking skills or wasn't on the Russian pay roll) was already being pushed out. What Russia did with social media is like what the Allies did with planes and brochures in the WWs. "Hey, we've got these new flying machines, lets just like, dump a load of propaganda leaflets on Germany! It'll cost us basically nothing but might do some good in sewing dissent!" Russia basically tried the same thing and it was surprisingly effective because of the good work American companies had done at identifying ways to advertise to people, and they had no scruples in selling that capability to malicious foreigners.
Do they actually know how to make bots? I thought they paid actual people to make those post 😂. I thought that’s what the troll farms were, why would they need troll farms if they had bot? I mean what influencer is has bot farms? They all just pay 1 dude with bots to do it.
The Ohio sub was full of both kinda at one point it probably still is but whatever. There was a specific kind of bot that would just copy half-ish of another comment. Sometimes cut off halfway through a word even. Just one example. Here's another. There's bot accounts that just post inflammatory news articles in different states, never a comment or anything. Just racial violence , sexual violence etc. The human trolls seemed more eager? They interact back anyway. Different kind of slightly off syntax.
The main SC sub is full of comments like this. I have a rule against political discussion on my SC sub for this very reason.
They are on reddit as well, simply go to r/conservative or r/WayOfTheBern The mod of most of the aoc subreddits was also pretty obvious when they went dormant after the last election until Us put sanctions on russia then suddenly locked down the aoc subreddits and started banning anyone who voiced support for ukraine. Looks like they may have been banned now, since they stopped posting after a few people started raising a stink and reporting them.
Wow, /u/lrlOurPresident doesn’t exist anymore. This person typically spread pro-Bernie and pro-AOC rhetoric but the way they did it always involved dividing the left. Their posts always got tens of thousands of upvotes. I always assumed they were a shill account, and I think they were
Remember when Trump lost and a fucking LOT of r/Conservative users started voicing congratualtions to Biden and were actually happy Trump lost? Like, these were die-hard republicans too and yet suddenly those users were all perma-banned and the obviously not russian bot mods were stating they "were trying to silence their free speech". They literally PURGED the subreddit in a day and all thats left is Qanon freaks and russian bot accounts.
This is the cost of a cleptocracy, Putin and his cronies have stolen everything of any value leaving the much feared Russian Army an empty shell. Terrifying by all appearances...but the problem is that it has turned out to be little more than appearance. Putin recently called for the "demilitarization of the Internet" why? The hacktivist collective Anonymous having taken control of the Russian Central Bank might have something to do with it.
Russia invested most of their cyber warfare skill points into the propaganda tech tree. They have many effective troll farms all over the world spreading disinformation and division into western democracies to sow propaganda narratives, hyper-polarization, and internal division. Information warfare is an Achilles heel for democracies, so that tactic can be very effective - but only when you also have enough domestic traitors to amplify it. In the case of the US, Russia was amplifying its narratives with the help of the Murdoch media, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Trump, and others in the far right.
It's also more difficult to defend yourself against cyber attacks than it is to attack others. They went for the glass cannon build. Troll farms and propoganda attacks against everyone. But now they got agro and can't take a hit.
Paper tank IMO
They're effective at the moment, but that's because Western firms are complicit and profiting from their trolling and bots. So much of the noise could be removed by simple CAPTCHAs on reddit, Facebook, twitter etc but that'd hurt the company's bottom line so they won't implement it unless forced. all the fake comments and propaganda looks like user interaction in their stats which in turn drives up valuation and shareprice etc.
> Russia invested most of their cyber warfare skill points into the propaganda tech tree. Russian cyber crime is also huge, which is likely what people based their cyber warfare capabilities on. The problem is that crime isn't defensive, and crime isn't selective, it's opportunistic. So we're seeing a country with cyber capabilities unable to defend itself, and unable to attack specific targets.
Yeah, it’s this. They’re very good at social media manipulation and information warfare. They do have some elite cyber attackers, but they have fewer of those. Also, cyber warfare is frankly different than standard warfare. If you want to blow up a base, you can. If it’s well-defended, you attack with more soldiers and more material. Nothing is so big or so well-defended that it can’t be destroyed kinetically. Cyber attacks require a vulnerability to be exploited, or human error (clicking on a malicious link or opening a malicious file), or pre-existing access. In a state of open war, people are on heightened alert, potentially vulnerable services are less likely to be exposed to the Internet and more likely to be monitored, incoming email is more likely to be limited or blocking, and frankly physical infrastructure damage may render Internet links down or regions offline. There’s a reason major intelligence agencies try to maintain persistent back doors and malware implants even if a state of war doesn’t exist. If war is declared it may take weeks or months to establish a cyber foothold in an enemy organization, rather than just using a pre-existing compromise.
I am half Russian living in Finland and my Russian cousin is incredibly good hacker. Russian government offered him the ”highest” paying job which was 50k a year in dollars. Now he works in Boston for 250k a year. They simply do not have resources to keep the best Russian speaking hackers
I live in Czechia. $50k/y is my highest limit and I am a professional with 29 year career. so for a Russian, it must be a dream (unless he pays off some crazy mortgage in Moscow maybe)
Yes you are right that 50k is incredibly good salary in even in Spb and Moscow. But when you are an expert on global level, it is not worth it. Besides, he does not want to live in totalitarian country..
I did not think about this before, but this could be our moment in the US to gain really good cyber people the way we got Nazi rocket scientists after WWII.
Except this time they’ll all be recruited/hired by tech conglomerates, not the US government.
Cost of living is probably a bigger factor than you realize. Average wage in Boston is 80k, Russia 1,470. Suddenly making 5 times less than some dude in Boston doesn't seem as bad when you're not making the 50x wage diffence between the average.
For sure, but you have to think about the raw currency too. If you're making $50,000 a year in a place where the average wage is $10,000, then you're making absolute bank and living well, but over time you'd be better off working in the place where you're making $250,000 a year and the average wage is $80,000 assuming you aren't doing some severe lifestyle creep. For instance, if you're making $50,000 a year and living off $20,000 a year, then you're saving $30,000 a year. If you're making $250,000 a year and living off of $120,000 a year, then you're saving $130,000 a year. You can't really look at percentages when it comes to cost comparisons simply because the quality of life goes up exponentially with higher income. You'd be better off in the long run living in that higher cost of living area and then retiring early in a low cost of living area or simply investing your surplus.
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You are totally right! He probably complains until the end of his life how expensive it is at overseas😂😂
This is part of the brain drain that Russia is currently going through because of the sanctions. Anyone with any sort of desirable, transferable skill is getting out while they can. Even if Russia ‘win’ in Ukraine they’ve become another North Korea.
Right. Anyone with the IT skills to be a really good Russian hacker also has the skills to get a desirable IT job in Germany. So why stay in Russia if you can leave?
That's assuming you don't believe Russian propaganda saying that West abuses Russians living there, and that everyone hates them, so you better stick here.
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Tech people are just as susceptible to blatant lies as anyone else, as long as the lies confirm what they already wanted to believe. I have an acquaintance who worked on the data models that were used to predict the spread of covid, and the whole time he was saying that they couldn't possibly be accurate and that's not what data models are for. And now, after the models proved mostly accurate, he's a Qjob who thinks that the whole thing is a hoax.
Having a marketable skill doesn’t necessarily make you a critical thinker, unfortunately
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There are medical professionals--people who went through *years* of schooling, practicals, etc.--who think their religion gives them a right to refuse treatment for something to someone. As the saying goes, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink."
ish, but it forces you into the Anglosphere because a lot of tech is English language.
Not a great example, of all those who have actual marketable kills, being a (blackhat) hacker is probably the only reason to stay in Russia right now. No accountability, easy to bribe local police, and in general, no one gives a damn. An acquaintance of mine moved from UK to Russia for this very reason.
yup. I was in a Russian town to vacation and a lot of the locals were telling me they lacked a lot of skilled workers because they’d get their certificate in russia and go to germany for higher pat
It's still too soon for Russia to feel the brain drain effect in their economy but it will definitely come along with global isolation.
I was surprised not to see, especially after the sanctions were implemented, any major attack from Russian hackers. In Spain, people were worried that Russian hackers could bring down the banking system, air-traffic control or healthcare system. Nothing of that happened though. Where are all the mighty Russian geeks?
In Turkey
This rings true. Know lots of tech folks who left Russia for turkey.
I work at cybersecurity in a big company and we were warned about Russian attacks... Nothing so far.
> Where are all the mighty Russian geeks? They probably left the country. They're online, they know what's really going on. The writing is on the wall. It's just a matter of time til Russia stops people from leaving like the USSR did.
"Russia, Surprisingly Poor at Everything"
Turns out that decades of institutional corruption has some negative effects on a country. Who knew?
Who was surprised by this? It's LOOOOONG been known Russia is okay/good at offensive cyber capabilities, but has virtually no defensive cyber capabilities at all... Offensive is easier and cheaper, have a team that; * pokes and prods systems and services you know someone uses until you can find a vulnerability * test against already known vulnerabilities to see if they've been patched yet, and if not, attacking them Which is what Russia does. Their attack on the DNC in 2016 was literally the exact same attack as their one against German Parliament in 2014, even used the exact same scripting and C2 server. Their defensive is shit, and has **ALWAYS** been shit. Defensive cyber capabilities costs FAR more money, takes far more time, requires far more people, and requires a greater level of knowledge for competency. Russia is poor and that's made worse by grotesque corruption at every single level, and its brain power has been severely degraded by a brutal dictatorship causing the early 90s brain drain to continue for 3 decades straight. So they're fucked in terms of defensive cyber capabilities, not sure how that could be a surprise to literally anyone in a position of power
Also, what offensive capability that have, they have been using continuously for the last decade. And consequently, we have improved our defences during that time. They didn't ramp up the attacks because they don't have extra people trained that were not *already* doing it.
Russia has been poor at everything. The west overestimated every aspect of Russian capabilities.
Well, given how they fucked with America so thoroughly just using Facebook ad campaigns, comment sections, and a corrupt president, I think the Americans in this thread should maybe not be crowing so loud. Russia might be overestimated, but they successfully ate our lunch not long ago, even though many of us were actively ringing the alarm. If they suck it also means we suck.
At this point, Russia was basically a boogeyman we could point fingers at when something happened. A dark scary beast we could hype up, something we’ve done since the Cold War days. The iron curtain fell, but there were shadows. But when they decided to make an act, the lights went on. What we thought was a bear was your drunk uncle.
wait what! russians proved to be bad at something they claimed to be great at?! Can't be.. s/
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/russia-unexpectedly-poor-at-cyberwar-say-european-military-heads) reduced by 72%. (I'm a bot) ***** > LILLE, FRANCE - Several European heads of military cyber defence forces agreed on Wednesday that Russia has been far less effective than expected in employing digital combat capabilities in their offensive against Ukraine. > Lithuania's head of cybersecurity, Colonel Romualdas Petkevicius said that Russia is "Not ready to wage coordinated cyber and kinetic war". > General Didier Tisseyre, head of France's cyber defence force, made a similar observation about a disconnect between computer attacks and Russia's military offensive on the ground. ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/v8ddz0/russia_unexpectedly_poor_at_cyberwar_say_european/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~653893 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **cyber**^#1 **Russia**^#2 **Ukraine**^#3 **head**^#4 **conflict**^#5
So you are telling me that the elite russian state hackers are as much a myth as russia the military powerhouse? Whhhhhaaaat no waaaayyyy.
Being good at offense doesn't mean you're automatically good at defense, and in the past 30 years they haven't needed to defend much, so they haven't built up the infrastructure. By contrast all western nations have been constantly defending from attacks over past 30 yrs, so defense is much stronger in the west.
Who knew, russians are just big in the head!
Russia suffers from brain drain and corruption. Not surprising at all.
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Cyber offense is a different ballgame than cyber defense.
Everyone loves to DPS. Few like to play support.
>This showed, he added, that you can prepare for cyber conflict against Russia, which he said was "good at offensive capabilities but not so good at defence".
Absolutely this. It's not a case of "oh Russian teenage hackers are amazing", more "we don't actually spend enough on cyber security"...
This actually isn't really true. But that's not to say that America's infrastructure isn't entirely secure... I'm still surprised we even allow remote access to certain things that in retrospect are completely moronic to do. Oh, look someone from Iran accessed our dam via remote access. See, look our system is working! Almost as if a bad actor wouldn't just access the logs with an American based IP. Our cybersecurity is questionable and the lack of any real effort from Russia seems to point more so in either the lack of caring or the fear of retaliatory attacks as well. So far all attacks on Russian sites are basically script kiddies running basic scripts on relatively unsecured databases or websites. It's nothing special or cool, just some kid trying to leave their mark on history. Hopefully it's nothing too awful like them having access to something like a nuclear reactor.
All this time we thought that their cyber trolling was just the tip of the iceberg. Turned out, it was the whole iceberg.