Last May 30, Ukraine was without internet for an hour. Russian providers tried to take over local circuits so that the government, companies and the population would be submissive to a cybernetic “bubble” favorable to Moscow’s military interests.
The United States managed to break through this digital blockade through channels established in 2014, when Russia annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, and Ukrainians came to rely on American help to protect themselves from Russian cyber warfare.
The account of this May incident was provided in Paris, without further details, by Jean-Paul Paloméros, former Chief of Staff of the French Air Force, who was one of the participants in a podcast by France Culture, a public radio station. The four specialists spoke about crime in the digital world and the way in which, using the expression of a Russian military graduate, we entered a “hybrid war”, in which the internet joined the arsenal of old conventional weapons.
For Westerners, the matter falls under the purview of NATO, the 30-member military alliance led by the United States. The first major cyberattack took place in 2007 in the tiny Baltic republic of Estonia. Since then, NATO has promoted classified exercises that simulate external hackers.
They are not exclusively Russian. There are also the Chinese, who now account for 80% of the digital crime market, according to a French agency in the field, and also the North Koreans and Iranians.
Organized crime operates under government protection in these countries, says Frederick Douzet, professor of geopolitics of the logosphere at the University of Paris-8. Criminal groups practice a meticulous division of tasks, such as stealing files, contacts for ransom collection and even sites for online negotiation between criminals and unwitting customers.
Curious detail, on which the professor insisted: in 2017, Russian groups released their balance sheets and contacts to prove their ability in cyber banditry. Of course, the addresses and identities of its leaders were fictitious. But the “production volume” was demonstrably real.
No wonder, too, that these malefactors have multiplied in the last six years at an incredible speed. French police alone investigated 600 attacks last year, up from just 65 in 2019.
In the last months of 2022 criminals broke into the archives of the French region of Normandy and a public hospital in Versailles. They obviously weren’t looking for a cash ransom, but to demonstrate that they were active, especially with the medical center, whose respectability grew during the fight against Covid.
Another indication of gigantism is in the episode involving a Russian group with a corporate name known as Konti. Its director publicly supported Vladimir Putin for the invasion of Ukraine. Ukrainian executives, in retaliation, posted 60,000 documents online that caused the collapse of the company, which certainly had obvious criminal ramifications.
Diplomat Jean-Louis Gergorin, creator of a specialized service at the Chancellery of France, recalled, in the podcast, that a commission of the American Senate investigated the participation of Russian students in American social networks, in which they identify themselves as victims of racism in Alabama or supremacists in Chicago. Over 160 million Americans have received these fake messages. And they had no means of verifying that it was not possible to take them seriously.
Finally, one of the unanimities of the program was the American businessman Elon Musk. Not because of its commercial blunders in buying Twitter, but because of the Starlink project, used as an advisory in communication between the Ukrainian military and its General Staff superiors.
Musk’s utility includes another curiosity, raised by Thomas Gomart, a historian of international relations. Originally, the internet emerged with the export of knowledge from the military sector to civilian companies. Now, when it comes to combating cybercrime, the path has been reversed. It is civilian technology that fuels the arsenal of military knowledge.
Gomart says that outside of the United States, no cybersecurity group has the knowledge accumulated by Microsoft. Its superiority is such that it seems somewhat naive to articulate, within the European Union, to create its own system of protection against digital crime.
The experts invited by France Culture did not reveal information about dismantled criminal groups. Any greater curiosity would break the secrecy and anonymity of the action of this new form of international police.
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
