You’ve all heard the stories about the Dark Web: Real hitmen for hire.
Red Rooms, where people are killed in front of a live audience.
Online markets where you can purchase grenades and chemical weapons.
Most of that is just legend; it’s not true, but what you’ll hear today is true.
Russia and Ukraine hackers right now are duking it out in the darkest part of the Internet.
Before discussing this underground war, let's explain some things.
The Dark Web, as some of you know, is that tiny bit of the web where people sometimes
go because they don’t want to be found.
The Dark Web is a small part of the Deep Web.
The Deep Web makes up around 96% to 99% of the Internet.
Your Gmail account is on the Deep Web.
It’s not indexed, so people can’t search for it.
Public websites are indexed, and that’s why you can search for them.
They are in the “Clear Web,” and this part of the Internet is pretty small in comparison
to the Deep Web.
No one really knows how much of the Deep Web the Dark Web takes up, but people have hazarded
a guess at 5%.
You can go to the Dark Web if you want something different.
To do that, you can download the Tor network.
It’s simple.
Once you’ve done that, you won’t see domains ending in .com but in .onion.
This refers to the anonymity you get on the Dark Web, which is layered like onions are.
In short, on the usual web, your IP address is not hidden when it searches for things.
On the Tor Network, your data is anonymized.
As one person explained, “Tor bounces your traffic through three random nodes one after
another.
And every time the traffic bounces through a node, it gets encrypted.”
So, you can’t be found.
This is why The US Department of Defense created Tor in the 1990s.
It was useful to people who didn’t want to be seen, such as spies.
It might also help activists or journalists who could be imprisoned or even executed for
saying certain things online.
Or even countries to fight each other, like how Russia is using it against Ukraine.
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Don’t think the Dark Web is all about crime.
Some people go there just to access Facebook or the BBC.
One time, the New York Times created a safe place on the Dark Web where whistle-blowers
could report government corruption and corporate malfeasance.
Many Americans, Brits, Germans, and Dutch people are also buying their drugs on the
Dark Web.
Some are buying or selling credit card information.
Some are interested in counterfeit items, or even guns, and sometimes they deal in a
kind of pornography that you might not find on the clear web.
But today, we’re going to focus on one particular activity on the Dark Web where it seems Russians
and Ukrainians excel.
You might have already heard about Russian hackers using the Dark Web.
Just recently, a bunch of them were threatening to release data they’d stolen from the Methodist
McKinney Hospital in the US.
Cyber security experts said that about 50 hospitals in the US had been hit with similar
attacks so far in 2022, but we can’t say if the hackers were all Russian.
The modus operandi they use is pretty simple.
They hack a network of a business, sometimes a very big business, and they might lock the
business out of its own network by encrypting the data.
It happened not long ago with a pipeline business in the US, and the company paid the $5 million
ransom to regain control of their systems.
The company, which served quite a chunk of the US, said it had no choice but to pay.
The alternative would have been utter chaos.
The hackers called themselves DarkSide, and their specialty was ransomware.
It’s thought they were Russian, but people have theorized that they are a mixed bunch,
perhaps coming from Russia but also Iran, North Korea, and some other countries in Eastern
Europe.
If that is true, it’s a major concern for the US.
That’s why President Joe Biden just signed an executive order to bolster US cyber defenses.
DarkSide later said they just wanted the cash.
They weren’t politically aligned at all.
They didn’t want anyone to get hurt.
In fact, they said they have hacking ethics.
They said they won’t hack schools or hospitals.
They don’t want to cause harm to the public.
They want to kick big companies where it hurts the most: their bottom line.
You have to wonder if a group of ordinary guys or girls can do such a thing to a major
pipeline company and potentially upset the lives of millions of people in the US; what
could a nation do if it was intent on causing mayhem?
What if the black hats signed up to fight in a war?
What if they were recruited and willing to do proper damage?
It’s not all about causing infrastructure problems, either.
What if they could get into the systems of government?
And lord almighty, imagine if they could get into weapons systems?
The Internet of Things these days includes weapons.
Ironically, the smarter weapons get, the more dangerous they become to the owners.
People that work in cyber-security are more aware of this threat than most of us.
As we speak, some of them are worried about what’s happening on the Dark Web between
Russia and Ukraine.
One company that works for the US government recently told The New Statesmen, “Nobody
rules the dark web like the Russian-speaking world.”
It goes without saying that the Russian government would want to find people on the Dark Web,
preferably their own kin, maybe like DarkSide, and hire them.
They could likely cause a great big mess in Ukraine by hacking infrastructure, the military,
or hospitals.
No doubt Vladamir Putin would love to have a word in their ear or ears.
But as you know, some hackers, or even most hackers, adhere to a certain kind of ethics,
or what you might call a “code of criminality.”
The New Statesman article explained that this unofficial code says, “You’re not allowed
to develop tools or sell embarrassing information that could hurt any nation in the CIS.
Those are the Commonwealth of Independent States, a group made up of former Soviet republics.”
Nonetheless, it seems things have changed since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The hackers, who in the past might have been said to be not interested in politics, are
now getting political.
A Russian hacking group that calls itself Conti posted something on the Dark Web that
showed their willingness to fight in this war.
They said they supported Russia all the way, adding that if anyone hacked Russia, they
would “strike back at the critical infrastructures of an enemy.”
When Conti was accused of actually working for the Russian government, they posted another
message on the Dark Web, saying they certainly were not in cahoots with Putin or any other
member of the Russian government.
Nonetheless, they said, if hacking negatively affected the Russian public, it was their
duty to hit back.
We’ll let them explain in their own words since it’s quite interesting what they said:
“As a response to Western warmongering and American threats to use cyber warfare against
the citizens of the Russian Federation, The Conti Team is officially announcing that we
will use our full capacity to deliver retaliatory measures in case the Western warmongers attempt
to target critical infrastructure in Russia or any Russian-speaking region of the world.
We do not ally with any government and condemn the ongoing war.
However, since the West is known to wage its wars primarily by targeting civilians, we
will use our resources to strike back if the well-being and safety of peaceful citizens
will be at stake due to American cyber aggression.”
Ukrainian hackers, who are also notorious, said, well, if you do that, then we will do
the same.
As you’ve seen in almost every gangster movie that’s been made, once a gentlemen’s
agreement has been broken, more often than not chaos breaks out.
This often becomes a vicious cycle of violence until someone has a so-called sit-down and
sorts the beef out.
We are presently a long way off these people coming to a peaceful agreement.
According to another US cyber-security firm, the conflict between hackers has been growing.
They said they have seen a “wide variety of attempts by dark web forum members to influence
the conflict from the cyber side.”
This is one reason why both Ukraine and Russia have put together crack teams of security
experts to keep an eye on the Dark Web.
They’re rightly worried about what these hackers could do as they don’t have any
control over them.
Or, at least, we don’t think they do.
When the Russians invaded Crimea in 2014, Russian hackers caused mayhem in the Ukrainian
telecoms system.
They even hacked the smartphones of some Ukrainian MPs, but at the end of the day, this was pretty
harmless.
Still, imagine if you could hack the phone of someone who makes decisions in the military.
Imagine if you could know what the other side was going to do next.
That would be as good as taking over pipeline systems.
Pipelines are still important, as you know from the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that recently
got blown up.
We still don’t know who did that.
Was it the US, or was it Russian sabotage?
We don’t need to know that today.
All we need to understand is the threat hackers could cause.
The pipeline's destruction tells us that gaining control of systems can cause ripples that
turn into tsunamis.
They themselves, metaphorically speaking, roll out across the ocean, hit land, and cause
widespread disruption.
Right now, it seems the hackers of the world are favoring Ukraine since it was Russia that
drew the first blood in terms of the war.
The hacking group known as Anonymous said not too long ago that it was “officially
in cyber war against the Russian government.”
They hacked a live TV broadcast in Russia earlier in the year and put up the message,
“Ordinary Russians are against the war.”
But the Russians are no pushovers when it comes to hacking.
They might even be top dogs, as we’ve seen in the ransomware attacks, and now it seems
some of them have formed a hacking alliance.
Some of the groups, all familiar with each other through the Dark Web, have agreed to
fight for their nation.
A group called KillNet has reportedly been recruiting more Russian hackers of late.
They recently declared war on 10 countries said to be allied with Ukraine.
They’ve already caused hacking mayhem in Germany, Italy, Romania, Norway, Lithuania,
and the US.
One expert in the US said, “They're not working together with Russia but in support
of Russia.”
They’ve now created what they call a “legion,” meaning a collective of hackers.
The Russian hacking group XakNet has also been busy.
It also said it doesn’t work with Russian security services but is “happy to provide
data to those who ask.”
If they work for the Russian government, they don’t say it, although it seems the Russian
government likes them.
A US expert said they are “heavily promoted in the Russian media as groups that are displays
of these patriotic volunteers that embody support for Russian government decisions.”
Still, it seems KillNet and XakNet have fallen out.
A member of KillNet recently told Wired, “Our enemy is your government bro.
But we are not dangerous to ordinary people.”
A security expert recently said KillNet is not anything like the hackers working for
Russian intelligence.
They’re the kind of group whose home is the Dark Web.
They work in the shadows of shadows and answer to no one.
He added, “Killnet's aim is to make Europeans pay for their unequivocal support of Ukraine
and punish Western governments for their anti-Russian sentiment.”
In July, KillNet’s founder left the group.
The western media said it was because there was too much attention on KillNet after a
recent hack on Lockheed Martin.
This information was gleaned by an undercover investigator who trawls the Dark Web for information.
He said the leader was replaced with a hacker named BlackSide, who apparently is an expert
in ransomware, phishing, and stealing from European cryptocurrency exchanges.
These groups have been going on the Dark Web to talk in chatrooms about a number of things,
but much of the conversations are said to be on the topics of leaking sensitive information
relating to Ukraine.
They talk about infiltrating government agencies, politicians, private companies, and other
hacking groups of the opposing side.
It seems Ukrainian hackers are doing the same.
They have also formed an alliance.
One of them goes back to 2016, being named the “Ukrainian Cyber Alliance.”
More Ukrainian hacking alliances have formed recently.
Earlier this year, Reuters ran the headline, “Ukraine calls on hacker underground to
defend against Russia.”
A more recent Ukrainian hacking collective goes by the name of “IT Army of Ukraine.”
This one, said to be about 400,000 people-strong, was actually set up by the Deputy Prime Minister
of Ukraine and the Minister of Digital Transformation.
He wrote on Twitter, “We are creating an IT army.
We need digital talents.”
The new term for this is “crowdhacking.”
They have already hacked Russia’s Space Agency, although Russia has denied that this
happened.
The group also hacked the personal data of 120,000 Russian soldiers and then dumped the
data online.
They have said the Russians have been doing this kind of thing for years, and now the
gloves are off.
It’s a full-blown hack-off, and it’s informally sanctioned by governments.
Still, some media reports state that western officials are quite concerned about these
hacking groups.
Their having too much power might create problems further down the line.
Officials in support of the hackers have said the rules are different in peacetime and wartime.
They say it is ok if there’s no direct harm to civilians.
Security experts have been watching this battle of hackers as best they can.
They say that Dark Web activity in this regard has just been increasing as the war goes on.
One expert said that the more news people read about the war on the clear web, the more
activity increases on the dark web.
He added, “The dark web is a mirror of the clear web, and now the dark web is a mirror
of the aboveground geopolitics.”
So, there’s a war on the ground and an underground war that most of us can’t see.
It’s hard to say who is winning the hacking war, but back in April 2022, the money was
on Ukraine winning.
A writer for The Intercept wrote back then, “Since the start of its invasion of Ukraine,
dozens of Russian organizations — including government agencies, oil and gas companies,
and financial institutions — have been hacked, with terabytes of stolen data leaked onto
the internet.”
Six million Russian documents were stolen and published, a size that we can only compare
with WikiLeaks, whose owner was sent to prison for hacking.
Obviously, not all information dumps are celebrated.
Yes, there is a bit of a contradiction at play, but let’s move on.
In October 2022, Russian hackers claimed they were the ones who took down a bunch of US
state government websites.
Colorado, Kentucky, and Mississippi were affected, as well as some other states.
This was more about disruption than lasting damage, thought it seemed related to the US
midterm elections.
CNN reported, “The hacking campaign does not appear to specifically target U.S. elections
infrastructure, though election-related websites can be indirectly or directly impacted through
the broader operation.”
The relation to the Dark Web is this attack might have been planned there.
It’s not as if these people discuss such activity on the free web.
As for the Infographics Show creative team that’s been covering the Dark Web, their
every keystroke is probably being watched by the FBI and a bunch of Russian and Ukrainian
hackers.
Just kidding, we hope…
Also, in October, Russian hackers hacked airport websites all over the US.
Again, this was only about disruption.
No one got hurt.
It was just annoying for the airports.
It seems the hacks didn’t cause all that much damage.
It wasn’t as if entire systems were taken over.
Imagine if you could hack passenger planes.
That really could cause significant damage, although so far, it seems the hackers would
not go that far even if they could.
Still, one group commenting on the airport hack wrote online, “Whoever participated
in the liquidation of the United States of America.
Do not stop!”
Now you need need to see how hitmen work on the Dark Web in “Why DARK WEB HITMAN Turned
on His Own.”
Or, have a look at “Crazy Things Actually Sold on the Dark Web.”