Over the years, Russia has built up one of the world’s most formidable cybercriminal ecosystems. Russian hacker groups are linked to disruptive cyberattacks including one of the United States’ most critical oil pipelines and the world’s largest meat producers.
A recently released study suggests that the conflict between Russia and the former Soviet Union disrupted the criminal ecosystem in Russia and its former Soviet satellite states. This was a year after the illegal invasion. Alexander Leslie, the associate threat intelligence analyst at Recorded Future's Insight Group, believes this is one of the most significant developments in the history of cybercrime. It has broad implications affecting nearly every aspect of the world of cybercrime.
In a recent interview with The Register, Leslie told them that these fractures can be felt in all facets of the Russian-speaking underground: digital fraud, dark web forums and marketplaces, ransomware gangs, and hacktivists, all of whom derive their revenue from Russian-speaking underground activities.
"Russia's military intervention in Ukraine has ushered in the era of volatility and unpredictability in the world of international cybercrime, which carries a multitude of implications for the defense community," Leslie said in a statement.
As per the report, Russian cybercrime refers to a wide range of crimes perpetrated by miscreants who speak Russian languages in a variety of parts of the world, including Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltics, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia.
Leslie, during the time before the war, all of these criminal elements shared a common goal. This goal was refusing to target entities located in the Commonwealth of Independent States. This was so as not to draw attention from law enforcement.
The day after the Russian government began attacking critical infrastructure on February 24, 2022, the Conti ransomware gang immediately declared its "full support" for the Russian government and pledged to use all the resources at its disposal to take back the critical infrastructure that had been destroyed. There were later claims that the country had condemned the war, but the damage had already been done at that point.
Hundreds of internal documents from Conti's internal domains were leaked by a Ukrainian security researcher on February 27, 2022. It was the so-called Conti leaks that led to the Trickbot leaks, which were able to reveal Trickbot's senior leadership by using the information revealed in the Conti data dump, which was appropriated by the Trickbot leaks. According to reports, Conti closed down its operations in the weeks that followed.
Moreover, Conti's rival gangs such as ALPHV (BlackCat) and LockBit neither declared their loyalty to the Kremlin to any significant extent, while on the other hand, some of his rival gangs did.
There is also a decrease in the number of ransomware attacks in the context of the war in general, which may be attributable to fewer Russian cyberattacks as well. It has been a year since the war started and fears of large-scale disruptions of Ukrainian and Western infrastructure have not yet been realized. Although Russia has not given up, Google reported that it would increase the targeting of Ukrainian users by 250 percent by the year 2022 compared to 2020. In contrast, it will increase the targeting of NATO users by 300 percent.
As experts point out, this is not necessarily an indictment of Russia's cyber capabilities. Instead, it is an indication of the effectiveness of Ukrainian cyber defense backed up by its Western allies and companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon on the ground. This is a largely successful strategy.
The Georgia Institute of Technology's Nadiya Kostyuk, who specializes in modern warfare and cyber conflict, has said that that support was "crucial" to Ukraine's cyberspace remaining relatively unscathed, despite the geopolitical turmoil around the world.
It is currently apparent that Ukraine's cyber capabilities haven't kept up with those of Russia even though it has been developing them since 2014. According to her, Microsoft, along with other companies, had played a huge part in building more resilient networks and systems as well as defending Ukraine's cyberspace.
Forum Rules for the Russian Dark Web.
The war did not only expose the fault lines of ransomware gangs, but also other criminals associated with these gangs. It would appear that the invasion of Ukraine also violates an unwritten rule on Russian-language dark web forums, which holds that criminals would not target organizations in former Soviet states unless they were inside the country.
Despite the increased geographical decentralization of cybercriminal groups, Leslie predicts that the industry will become more centralized in the future.
During the kinetic war and in the immediate aftermath of it, there was also an increase in pro-Russian hacktivist groups. The 'second wave' of hacktivism took place around March 22, 2022, when Killnet's campaign against the Latvian government was initiated, following the initial wave of hacktivism, which included pre-existing groups such as the Stormous ransomware gang as well as new crews that were created to support the Russian war effort.
An Increase in the Number of Killnets
Despite that, Recorded Future claims that Killnet dominated this second wave of electronic music.
As a consequence of these attacks, the gang and its subgroups have expanded their targets beyond Europe. They have in recent years targeted the Americas, Asia, and other parts of the world.
Recorded Future says that most of the pro-Russian hacktivist groups active since the end of the war are no longer active despite estimates by security researchers such as @Cyberknow20 that there were 70 or more such groups active at the beginning of the war.
As the authors point out, although they identified about 100 such groups between February 24, 2022, and February 10, 2023, only a few remain active today. This is even though a total of about 100 groups were identified.
Even those that remain are not very effective, as there are only a few left. A new FBI report describes Killnets' distributed denial of service attacks as having "limited success" in the course of their attacks. Additionally, the researchers point out that their impact on the overall war effort has been "minimal" at best, in terms of the effects on the war effort.
Is 2023 Going to be a Year of Change?
A second year of the war is expected to bring more of the same from security researchers, with insider criminal gangs leaking information, hacktivist attacks making headlines, and database dumps being sold on dark-web forums - possibly with a rise in Russian and Belarusian databases that have been leaked - as well as credential leaks targeting .ru and .by domains that have been targeted by hackers.
As a result of the malware-as-a-service threat landscape and the ongoing changing of the criminal forums on the dark web, "volatility and instability" are predicted to persist through 2023 throughout the Russian-speaking dark web market.
In the short term, Leslie predicts that the cyber efforts of Ukraine are likely to be stepped up in 2023.
The public-private partnership has helped foster increased collaboration between intelligence agencies and the provision of active defensive support, and we anticipate that this will only increase in the years to come, Leslie added.
The majority of offensive operations are likely to be undertaken by the IT Army of Ukraine. This is expected to maintain support to enable a method of crowdsourced hacktivism that will continue to dominate offensive operations.
He says he expects more hack-and-leak attacks from the Ukrainian IT Army in the future, but the most dominant methods of attack will likely remain DDoS attacks and website defacement.
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