[liberationtech] Leak Shows Russia’s Request for a Cyberweapon That Can Take Countries Offline

[Yosem Companys]

Hackers have leaked documents showing that Russia’s secret services made a
request for a cyberweapon that could take nations offline, Meduza reports. The
“Digital Revolution” group uploaded an archive of documents dating to 2017 and
2018 showing a request from a division of Russia’s Federal Security Service for
the development of “Fronton” software that would enable cyberattacks using
infected Internet-of-Things devices. The software, which came in three forms,
could infect any smart device, from digital assistants to “smart” homes,
connecting them into a network and then attacking the servers responsible for
the stability of online services and the internet itself in entire countries. An
attack using a few hundred thousand smart devices would be able to knock out
social networks and file-hosting services for several hours, while “an attack on
national DNS servers could render the Internet inaccessible for several hours in
a small country.”
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ghserv.net/pipermail/lt/attachments/20200320/56bf5d20/attachment.html>