Have you ever considered how easy it may be to gain access to wartime critical controls from a global power? According to this video published by Vice News, it may not be as difficult as you may think. Ethical Hackers around the globe are banding together to assist Ukraine in its wartime effort without even leaving their desk.
Vice News reports that the country of Belarus is run by Lukashenko, one of Europe's last dictators. Lukashenko is a key supporter of Russia's wartime efforts by transporting Russian supplies, including: troops, tanks, food, and ammunition's by railway to the Ukrainian front line.
Many people in the country of Belarus do not want to be involved with the Kremlins war and so some are forming underground organizations to try and fight back against the dictator Lukashenko. Cyber Partisans is one such group. They are an anonymous hacktivist group working tirelessly to take down critical systems supporting the wartime effort and their own dictatorial government.
The Washington Post reports in a recent article that, Cyber Partisan's is targeting Belarusian railroads to disrupt Russian troops and supplies from reaching the front lines to disrupt the wartime efforts. They are able to do this by hacking into the railways critical systems and disabling or damaging "servers, databases and workstations" that are necessary for normal operation. They plan to hold these systems hostage until specific demands are met by the government. Cybersecurity experts indicate the hackers could maintain control over the rail network indefinitely.
In the Vice News article, a spokesperson for Cyber Partisan indicates that hacking into the Belarusian was "not very difficult" because they employed poor cybersecurity protocols and standards. The spokesperson also indicated that all critical systems ran on Windows Xp, which is an outdated and easy to hack operating system. This was able to be done easily, despite many members of Cyber Partisans being inexperienced and often untrained hackers. This is a prime example of how failure to invest into modern cybersecurity protocols allows can cause an organization of any size to become a target of hacking, data leaks, and preventable systems damage.
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