Article of the Day: Cyber Crime trends between Russia and Ukraine

How the Russia-Ukraine conflict is impacting cybercrime — Intel471, 2/15/2022

Intel471 looks at cyber crime forums and discussion trends for insight into cyber criminal action. With tensions extremely high between Russia and Ukraine, they look to see if cyber criminals — who are typically recruited by Russia — are doing anything different.

What they found was somewhat surprising. According to Intel471, there was no increased chatter by cyber criminals against Ukraine any more than normal. As a matter of fact, Russia has somewhat greased the wheel for international cyber cooperation by arresting several cyber criminals and breaking up cyber crime conglomerates. Intel471 posits that this increase in arrests could be seen as a token of irregular warfare goodwill by Russia to decrease anger at them for invading Ukraine. Intel471 hypothesizes if Russia doesn’t get their way in Ukraine, they could possible let the hackers free and give them free reign to attack non-Russian cyber targets.

So far, Russia is playing predominately by the nation-state playbook against Ukraine. Military movements are high cost and everyone sees them coming. Because everyone sees them coming, they are used to send a highly visible message. Cyber crime, on the other hand, is mostly invisible.

Putin is a sly character and his military forces are also sly. They could still be aligned with cyber criminals on other forums and communication channels. But thus far, according to Intel471, the cyber criminals haven’t shown their hand in their usual hangouts.