Russia’s Cyber Forces

Russia is well known for its mil­i­tary men­tal­ity. Remember the cold war? It has taken nearly a decade for the world to real­ize the true threat of cyber war. Today, the world is depen­dent on com­put­ers and net­works much more than we were eight years ago when we expe­ri­enced the NATO-​​Serbia cyber war. Russia opened the eyes of the world to the loom­ing threat of cyber war­fare after the Estonia inci­dent. Just last week Russia’s State Sponsored cyber forces opened up a new front in cyber war.

Reports indi­cate that Russian Cyber Forces unleashed a large scale cyber attack on Radio Free Europe. In addi­tion, there is some evi­dence of the use of BotNets in polit­i­cally moti­vated dis­trib­uted denial-​​of-​​service (DDoS) attacks. With all this demon­strated abil­ity, should we be con­cerned? What are Russia’s true cyber war­fare ambi­tions? Russia’s Cyber Warfare Doctrine is designed to be a force mul­ti­plier along with more tra­di­tionary mil­i­tary actions includ­ing WMD attacks. A force mul­ti­plier is a mil­i­tary term that describes a weapon or tac­tic that, when added to and employed along with other com­bat forces, sig­nif­i­cantly increases the com­bat poten­tial of that force.

Like all offen­sive cyber strate­gies it includes the capa­bil­ity to dis­rup­tion the infor­ma­tion infra­struc­ture of their ene­mies. This doc­trine includes strate­gies that would dis­rupt finan­cial mar­kets, mil­i­tary and civil­ian com­mu­ni­ca­tions capa­bil­i­ties as well as other parts of the enemy’s crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture prior to the ini­ti­a­tion of tra­di­tional mil­i­tary oper­a­tions. They also address weaken the econ­omy of their adver­sary to fur­ther decrease their abil­ity to respond to the com­bined threat. Offensive cyber weapons receive great atten­tion in the Russian Cyber Warfare Doctrine. This cou­pled with advanced R&D puts them on the leader board in cyber warfare.

Cyber attacks and cyber weapons are strate­gic arms and in effect are real offen­sive weapons. Cyber-​​attacks can harm or even par­a­lyze a coun­try and there­fore have equiv­a­lent impli­ca­tions as that of phys­i­cal mil­i­tary attacks. Most cyber attacks leave behind foren­sic evi­dence that can be used to assess the capa­bil­i­ties of the attacker. With all the attacks attrib­uted to Russia, there has to be sig­nif­i­cant intel­li­gence out there about tech­niques, cyber weapons, and strate­gies that have been used in these cyber assaults. An inter­est­ing point is that NATO’s Defensive Treaty drawn up in 1949 does not deal with cyber weapons as the Internet did not yet exist and there were very few com­put­ers at the time.

Once again, war­fare capa­bil­i­ties have out­paced our legal and polit­i­cal sys­tems. Former Russian President Vladimir Putin has blasted the US for its mil­i­taris­tic approach to for­eign pol­icy, say­ing its actions were “nour­ish­ing an arms race.” Need some more evi­dence? In 1998, Russia’s defense bud­get was less than $3 bil­lion. Since that time, the Russian defense bud­get has been soar­ing, funded by sub­stan­tial increases in their petro­leum income, the bud­get jumped 23 per­cent in 2007 to $32.4 billion.

An inter­est­ing point to keep in mind is that Moscow does the arms busi­ness with over 70 coun­tries, includ­ing China, Iran, and Venezuela, and in 2006 exported $6 bil­lion worth of arms. Russian intel­li­gence ser­vices have a his­tory of employ­ing hack­ers against the United States. In 1985 the KGB hired Markus Hess, an East German hacker, to attack U.S. defense agen­cies in the infa­mous case of the Cuckoo’s Egg.

The fol­low­ing is an esti­mate of Russia’s cyber capabilities.

Russia’s 5th-​​Dimension Cyber Army:

Military Budget: $40 Billion USD

Global Rating in Cyber Capabilities: Tied at Number 4

Cyber Warfare Budget: $127 Million USD Offensive Cyber Capabilities: 4.1 (1 = Low, 3 = Moderate and 5 = Significant)

Cyber Weapons Arsenal in Order of Threat:

• Large, advanced BotNet for DDoS and espionage
• Electromagnetic pulse weapons (non-​​nuclear)
• Compromised coun­ter­feit com­puter software
• Advanced dynamic exploita­tion capabilities
• Wireless data com­mu­ni­ca­tions jammers
• Cyber Logic Bombs Computer viruses and worms
• Cyber data col­lec­tion exploits Computer and net­works recon­nais­sance tools
• Embedded Trojan time bombs (suspected)

Cyber Weapons Capabilities Rating: Advanced

Cyber force Size: 7,300 +

Reserves and Militia: None

Broadband Connections: 23.8 Million +

Close ties with Russian Business Network (RBN), who is thought to own and oper­ate the sec­ond largest BotNet in the world. Intelligence sug­gests there are orga­nized groups of hack­ers tied to the Federal Security Bureau (FSB).

The FSB is the inter­nal counter intel­li­gence agency of the Russian Federation and suc­ces­sor to the Soviet KGB. Russia is often over­looked as a sig­nif­i­cant player in the global soft­ware indus­try. Russia pro­duces 200,000 sci­en­tific and tech­nol­ogy grad­u­ates each year. This is as many as India, which has five times the pop­u­la­tion. This is hard to believe since their soft­ware indus­try can be traced back to the 1950s.

A study by the World Bank stated that more than one mil­lion peo­ple are involved in soft­ware research and devel­op­ment. Russia has the poten­tial to become one of the largest IT mar­kets in Europe. The Russian hacker attack on Estonia in 2007 rang the alarm bell. Nations around the world can no longer ignore the advanced threat that Russia’s cyber war­fare capa­bil­i­ties have today and the ones they aspire to have in the near future.

From this infor­ma­tion, one can only con­clude that Russia has advanced capa­bil­i­ties and the intent and tech­no­log­i­cal capa­bil­i­ties nec­es­sary to carry out a cyber attack any­where in the world at any time.

– Kevin Coleman

May 27th, 2008 | Cyber-warfare | 286517 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2008/05/27/russias-cyber-forces/Russia%27s+Cyber+Forces2008-05-27+14%3A17%3A10Ward You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.