I had an interesting get-together recently with Misha Glenny, an
award-winning expert on organized crime. We chatted after Glenny spoke
in New York City at a financial security conference hosted by Actimize, a
unit of Israel-based communications and video software maker Nice
Systems (NICE) .
A former Central Europe correspondent for the Guardian and BBC, Glenny authored the acclaimed 2008 book “McMafia: A Journey Through The Global Criminal Underworld.”
Glenny’s spent much time and effort tracking transnational gangs like the Ukrainian Mob since the breakup of the Soviet bloc in the late 1990s.
Glenny was musing on the spread of Russian hackers worldwide. He advanced a theory that an obscure town called Sillamae on Estonia’s Baltic Coast was a main cradle of the illicit digital community that today stretches across vast regions of the former Soviet Union. These mostly Russian hackers break into the databases of banks and governments worldwide, organize Internet scams and send countless pieces of spam each day. They also are said to provide technical support for larger, Russian-based criminal groups and maybe a few others.
“Sillamae was a nuclear facility where the Soviets developed the first atomic bomb. The people who worked there were Russians imported into Estonia. These were very sophisticated scientific workers,” Glenny said.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1990s, he says these brilliant and pampered technicians suddenly found themselves out of a job.
The top-secret town, which produced nuclear fuel rods and had uranium mines nearby, was also the scene of a terrible accident under Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in which nuke waste seeped into a children’s playground.
All this, he says, served to sour the scientists and their families on legitimate and officially-sanctioned ways of making a living.
“Sillamae was a strange, weird place. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the children of these scientists formed a group of hackers who had a huge impact on the development of what’s called the Russian Business Network,” Glenny said.
The RBN, despite its innocuous sounding name, was a huge incubator for malfeasance on the Web, Glenny says. If you believe that scientific aptitude is partly genetic and can be transferred from parents to offspring, then these young Russian hackers were the best of the best when it came to doing bad stuff on the Web. Since their folks were unemployed, these rocket-scientist kids were also very keen on making money by any means necessary. “You can trace back where all these hacker kids come from — Sillamae,” Glenny claimed.
Glenny says the RBN was a Internet hosting system based out of St. Petersburg. It provided a foundation for these hackers to conduct various types of nefarious Internet-based schemes.
Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, is the KGB’s successor. The FSB carries out intelligence, counterintelligence, counterterrorism, economic crime probes, electronic intelligence collection, border control and social monitoring for Russia’s government.
Glenny says the FSB is using the young hackers from Sillamae to conduct various covert activities on the Web for official and unofficial purposes.
“These guys from Sillamae went from St. Petersburg to Prague in the Czech Republic, they went down to Odessa in the Ukraine, leading to a very very effective informal network that was able to create Web hosting in Russia itself. All this is monitored by the FSB and they will mobilize this hacking capacity when it suits them to do so,” Glenny claimed.
Glenny says there’s a global hacker problem, and it’s spreading.
“You can see roots (for hacking) in various parts of the world. Russia and the Ukraine, the Baltic States. Brazil is another. So is China. Over the last five years, we’ve also seen it spread all over Western Europe and the U.S.,” Glenny said.
One upshot is that established mobs like the Italian Mafia no longer have a monopoly on crime in a Digital Age. Even some geeky kids from towns like Sillamae can break into the business.
While pundits hail the democratizing power of the Web, Glenny says the Internet is also democratizing the power of organized crime.
By Doug Tsuruoka
http://blogs.investors.com/click/index.php/home/60-tech/2090-was-estonian-town-the-mother-of-all-russian-hacker-networks
A former Central Europe correspondent for the Guardian and BBC, Glenny authored the acclaimed 2008 book “McMafia: A Journey Through The Global Criminal Underworld.”
Glenny’s spent much time and effort tracking transnational gangs like the Ukrainian Mob since the breakup of the Soviet bloc in the late 1990s.
Glenny was musing on the spread of Russian hackers worldwide. He advanced a theory that an obscure town called Sillamae on Estonia’s Baltic Coast was a main cradle of the illicit digital community that today stretches across vast regions of the former Soviet Union. These mostly Russian hackers break into the databases of banks and governments worldwide, organize Internet scams and send countless pieces of spam each day. They also are said to provide technical support for larger, Russian-based criminal groups and maybe a few others.
“Sillamae was a nuclear facility where the Soviets developed the first atomic bomb. The people who worked there were Russians imported into Estonia. These were very sophisticated scientific workers,” Glenny said.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1990s, he says these brilliant and pampered technicians suddenly found themselves out of a job.
The top-secret town, which produced nuclear fuel rods and had uranium mines nearby, was also the scene of a terrible accident under Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in which nuke waste seeped into a children’s playground.
All this, he says, served to sour the scientists and their families on legitimate and officially-sanctioned ways of making a living.
“Sillamae was a strange, weird place. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the children of these scientists formed a group of hackers who had a huge impact on the development of what’s called the Russian Business Network,” Glenny said.
The RBN, despite its innocuous sounding name, was a huge incubator for malfeasance on the Web, Glenny says. If you believe that scientific aptitude is partly genetic and can be transferred from parents to offspring, then these young Russian hackers were the best of the best when it came to doing bad stuff on the Web. Since their folks were unemployed, these rocket-scientist kids were also very keen on making money by any means necessary. “You can trace back where all these hacker kids come from — Sillamae,” Glenny claimed.
Glenny says the RBN was a Internet hosting system based out of St. Petersburg. It provided a foundation for these hackers to conduct various types of nefarious Internet-based schemes.
Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, is the KGB’s successor. The FSB carries out intelligence, counterintelligence, counterterrorism, economic crime probes, electronic intelligence collection, border control and social monitoring for Russia’s government.
Glenny says the FSB is using the young hackers from Sillamae to conduct various covert activities on the Web for official and unofficial purposes.
“These guys from Sillamae went from St. Petersburg to Prague in the Czech Republic, they went down to Odessa in the Ukraine, leading to a very very effective informal network that was able to create Web hosting in Russia itself. All this is monitored by the FSB and they will mobilize this hacking capacity when it suits them to do so,” Glenny claimed.
Glenny says there’s a global hacker problem, and it’s spreading.
“You can see roots (for hacking) in various parts of the world. Russia and the Ukraine, the Baltic States. Brazil is another. So is China. Over the last five years, we’ve also seen it spread all over Western Europe and the U.S.,” Glenny said.
One upshot is that established mobs like the Italian Mafia no longer have a monopoly on crime in a Digital Age. Even some geeky kids from towns like Sillamae can break into the business.
While pundits hail the democratizing power of the Web, Glenny says the Internet is also democratizing the power of organized crime.
By Doug Tsuruoka
http://blogs.investors.com/click/index.php/home/60-tech/2090-was-estonian-town-the-mother-of-all-russian-hacker-networks