Tag: Ukraine

Ukraine war will have a knock on effect here

Posted on March 7, 2022 by - News

Economic sanctions against Tsar Putin will have a significant impact on the IT channel, according to analysts at Context.

According to a report cross-border payments are extremely challenging if not impossible for channel players and their customers now that major banks are locked out of the SWIFT system. The EU and US have banned the supply of hi-tech goods including semiconductors, computers, telecoms and information security equipment. Russian aircraft are banned from European airspace, and Boeing/Airbus have stopped servicing the Russian aviation industry, which will further restrict transport flows.

German government sites hacked

Posted on January 7, 2015 by - News

wargames-hackerA number of official Gernan government sites have been hacked by a group that claims affinity with the Russian government’s moves in Ukraine.
According to Reuters, the websites hacked include the pages of Chancellor Angela Merkel.
A spokesman for Merkel told reporters that her site was inaccessible from around 09:00 GMT today.
The data centre that hosts the page had come under attack from hackers who are in sympathy with Russia’s views on Ukraine.
A group that described itself as CyberBerkut claimed responsibility for the hacks.
In addition to attacking Merkel’s site, the group also said that it had attacked Bundestag websites too.
Angela Merkel is in London this afternoon to meet British prime minister David Cameron.

 

Putin wants Obama’s internet kill switch

Posted on September 22, 2014 by - News

Putin + gunTsar Vladimir Putin of Russia is envious of the fact that President Barak Obama can flick a switch and turn off the internet.

Apparently the Kremlin is to discuss taking control of the .ru domain and measures to disconnect Russians from the web in the event of a serious military confrontation or big anti-government protests at home.

Putin will discuss what steps Moscow might take to disconnect Russian citizens from the web “in an emergency”, the Vedomosti newspaper reported.

It means that it would strengthen Russia’s sovereignty in cyberspace, but also bring the domain .ru under state control.

Putin controls the TV and the country’s newspapers, but has left the internet as an open place for discussion. At the moment it is policed by state-sponsored bloggers and Putin fans.

The move seems to come as Putin is squaring off against Western media which it thinks is unfair in  its coverage of the invasion of the Ukraine.  Apparently Putin is furious that the Western media does not agree with his decision to arm Russian nationalists so that they can shoot down passenger jets or refuse to print his claim that the Ukraine government are really Nazis.

Of course the fact that the Russians beat up a BBC team that went to investigate reports of Russian servicemen killed in Ukraine does not really endear him to the Western hacks.

According to Vedomosti, Russia plans to introduce the new measures early next year.  Russia has mooted building a “national internet”, which would in effect be a domestic intranet. These proposals go further, expanding the government’s control over ordinary Russian internet users and their digital habits.

It would be technically possible for Moscow to shut off the internet because Russia has “surprisingly few” international exchange points. All of them are under the control of national long-distance operations, like Rostelecom, which is onside with Putin.

Putin is popular but the economy, which is already teetering on the verge of recession, is reeling from ever more stringent Western sanctions over Moscow’s alleged support for separatists in eastern-Ukraine.

NATO goes nuclear on cyber option

Posted on September 3, 2014 by - News

wenn2114091NATO is going to revise its treaty so that a cyber attack on one of its members will count as a hostile threat for all of them.

The plan is that when President Obama meets with other NATO leaders later this week, they are expected to ratify the idea that a cyberattack on any of the 28 NATO nations could be declared an attack on all of them, similar to a ground invasion or an airborne bombing.

This should put the fear of god into Russia, which was believed behind computer attacks that disrupted financial and telecommunications systems in Estonia in 2007 and Georgia in 2008, and is believed to have used them in the early days of the Ukraine crisis as well.

NATO is a bit behind when it comes to cyber security, although it now has just built a nice new computer security centre.  It does run computer exercises but it possesses no cyberweapons of its own and has no cunning plan how it might use the weapons of member states to strike back in a computer conflict.

The United States and Britain, have spent billions of dollars on secret computer offensive programs but they have not told NATO leaders what kind of weapons they might contribute in a NATO-led computer conflict.

The change in NATO’s definition of an “armed attack” will leave deliberately unclear what would constitute a cyberattack so large that the alliance might think that this would be a declaration of war.

Apparently the alliance is hoping that the impact of the attack will help define the matter. Defence experts point out that deterrence is all about ambiguity, and the implicit threat that NATO would enter a computer conflict in defence of one of its members is full of those ambiguities.

Emerging markets open up to increased data centre investment

Posted on January 21, 2013 by - News

datacentrebatteriesAccording to a report from Tariff Consultancy Ltd, which focuses on data centre development in 11 emerging markets, Russia and Turkey are way ahead of the pack.

TCL looked at Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, and the Ukraine. Of these, the four largest are Russia, Turkey, Ukraine and Bulgaria respectively, though in the group, Russia by itself is expected to account for half of all data centre floor space by the end of the year.

Generally speaking, the size of the data centres are relatively small, TCL noted. In the 11 regions, the average size was just over 800 square markets, which is a great deal less than in established markets. The largest facility has up to 10,000 square metres of raised floor space. However, over the next five years, the total space should rise to 143,000 square metres, up from 109,000 at present – or a 30 percent increase going into 2018.

Pricing will also increase, with the average rack space rental increasing 10 percent up to 2018. The most expensive pricing is in the Russian market.

Trends outlined in the report mirror a transformation in the regions which are seeing more and more development and investment, both from foreign investors and by government, with a view to boost economic growth in the countries. This could also, of course, prove a boon to channel players looking for new markets to open up in. Ultimately, TCL concludes, the development of data centre space in these emerging markets proves high spec housing and hosting is no longer exclusive to established markets.