Pierluigi Paganini March 13, 2012

There is no doubt that through the analysis of the operations of a State in cyber space it is possible to create a political profile of the country itself, discover the level of technology available and design covenants and relations with other countries.
Not a day passes without discussion on the hostile Iran, which would seem to be the bogeyman of the Western world but in reality the problems are elsewhere, nations like China and Russia in the name of profit repeatedly violate any kind of international agreement. Today I would like to pause on the giant Russia, a country which I think should frighten the West, much of the feared Iran. Russia in the last decade has seen a growth extremely complex to analyze. Hierarchs of former KGB have actually instantiated an oligarchic government in which representatives of the regime without scruples pursue their personal interests. Hence the changing face of Russia, we have become accustomed to powerful magnates who live in luxury and represent the country abroad. As we shall see shortly the absence of a political confrontation with an opposition that has been literally choked has made possible many choices of the government now dangerous to the safety of many people all over the world.

We start from what is one of the situations of greatest pain for the world politics, Syria. More than 8,000 people were killed in the last year, when is started the revolt broke out against the regime of Bashar al Assad has said the UN General Assembly President, Nassir Abdulaziz al-Nasser. The position of Russia, in combination with China, was now hostile to a penalty to be combined to Syria. Why? The reason is purely economic demonstrating that the lives of thousands of people has no value, they are willing to cover a massacre just to bring home a good deal. In December Russia has signed a contract to sell combat jets to Syria in open defiance of international condemnation of His regime’s bloody crackdown. The business daily Kommersant, reported that the sale includes the delivery of 36 Yak-130 aircraft for an amount of $550-million and the firm involved in the transaction is the Russian state arms trader Rosoboronexport. Curious that the report of the sale has made public the same day that Human Rights Watch called Russia’s backing of the Syrian regime “immoral.”

The Yakovlev Yak-130 is a subsonic two-seat advanced jet trainer/light attack aircraft or lead-in fighter trainer (LIFT) developed by the Yakovlev design bureau. Russia’s doesn’t provided explanation or excuses over suspicions that a Russian ship had delivered munitions to Syria despite an EU arms embargo according the declaration of the Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

It is just the beginning, that’s obvious that every conflict can be a valuable opportunity to do business. Still on the subject of Syria and the possibility that an international resolution providing for an attack to overthrow the murderous regime, Russian experts recently upgraded Syria’s long-range radar systems.

The Russian experts operated in the radar facility south of Damascus, where several relatively old radar systems are stationed. The experts has installed new equipment in the radar facility south of Damascus and modified software for other systems. Similar work was done on the radar system positioned at Mount Sannine in Lebanon.  Great effort has been spent in the upgrade activities maybe to be able to discover new generation of aircraft like US F-35 stealth fighter which was also procured by the Israeli Air Force.  In addition, Russia claims that it has developed the capability to detect stealth aircraft by positioning several radars in a certain area. The operation has been completed to prevent and face an attack made by Israel.

Russia has been a strong historical ally of Syria since Soviet times when the country was led by the president’s father Hafez Assad. It has supplied Syria with aircraft, missiles, tanks and other modern weapons.

Do you think that being allied nations such as Russia can provide strategic advantages? Faced with the business reasons there is no strong alliance and to demonstrate this let’s read the news published by WikiLeaks declares that Russia provided Israel security codes to access Iran’s Tor- M1 air-defense systems in exchange for an Israeli handover of codes to “hack” drones sold to Georgia, according to a leaked email from a private American intelligence company. The Tor-M1 defense system is made up of launch vehicles carrying batteries of surface-to- air missiles. It can detect and track up to 48 targets in the air, and can operate in an “intensive aerial jamming environment,” according to the Defense Update website. Iran purchased 29 systems from Russia in 2005.

You object that Russia’s behavior is similar to that of many other nations, and unfortunately I have to agree with you but before you consider countries like Iran the only threat to the West should be taken into account these aspects.
If the military front the behavior of Russia is very questionable, even worse is the work in the cyber space. Industrial espionage and spying on foreign sources of key governmental activities, but not only. Just a group of Russian hackers have caused many attacks carried out in recent years. The suspicion is that these hackers are in fact sponsored by central government. Demonstration of this is the massive use of cyber army to suppress the opposition.

So here we are confronted with what is a real digital censorship, opposition websites under attack by phantom hackers, actions that have produced the desired effects … countless blogs have disappeared, massive and successfully actions of defacing on opposition websites, messages delete from social networks and forums judged to discuss against the regime choices. It happened during the protests against anti-Putin, the focus has moved into cyberspace theater of this new repression. Dumbledore undoubtedly controversial but equally deafening. Nobody knows, nobody seems to contradict the imperative actions and whose authorship is given to hackers phantom whose reasons are frankly incomprehensible.
In recent months, Hell has successfully attacked with surgical precision blog and web sites of journalists and political activists, many of the opposition. Curious, isn’t it?
The mud machine did not stop here, but it has operated also beyond the elections, on 4 December all behind the silence of the mainstream press. That is an attack against the main tool of democracy, the vote.
The situation is unchanged during the election of last week when “A wave of spam e-mails promoting a rally” against Putin is delivering the spyware as an attachment that appears to be a Word document. In reality, the file is a software program known as “Trojan.Dropper”, said anti-virus software maker Symantec.
The e-mails began circulating around March 5, according to Symantec’s official blog.

The subject line in the e-mail call demonstrators to action with phrases like: “all to demonstration”, “instructions what to do” or “meeting for the equal elections” meanwhile the body of the e-mail request to the receiver to open the attachment, announcing it contains “need-to-know” information.  When the user opens the file the file drops a Trojan horse virus onto the user’s computer according the news reported by CNN.

We can discuss for hours, mind you I do not want my article to point the finger against Russia alone, but would like share my opinion regarding a country that today
offends the concept of democracy and that I consider dangerous like Iran and China.

Pierluigi Paganini