The world war of the Third Millennium has opened at least two new departments, or rather one has changed its name, from dis-information it has become fake news, while one is brand new: cyber warfare. And the Ukrainian-Russian conflict was the first front in which fighters on both sides competed for victory exactly like in a video game but at the cost of real human lives.
A hacker attack was carried out against the operator of the Russian Mir payment system. The National Payment Card System (NSPC) would be attacked, a Kommersant source in the IT market reported. As of 10pm Moscow time on October 30, the company’s website was unavailable. The archive contains a copy of the NSPK main page with a link to the website of the hacker group DumpForums. The NSPK denies a data leak.
Roskomnadzor, the Russian cyber regulator, has not received notifications about a possible data leak from the website of the National Payment Card System (NSCP, operator of the Mir payment system), the department’s press service told TASS . Previously the media reported that information about the hacking of the company’s website appeared on the main page of the NSPK.
Cybercriminals gained access to the email addresses of about 632,000 federal employees at the US Department of Defense and Department of Justice, Bloomberg reported, citing a report from the US Office of Personnel Management. According to him, the cyber attack itself was carried out on May 28 and 29. According to the agency, the Clop hacker group, allegedly linked to Russia, is suspected of the crime. According to the report, hackers managed to access the data by exploiting a vulnerability in the MOVEit file transfer program.
And finally, Ukrainian infrastructure was hit by hackers. Russian hackers from the Solntsepek group, who recently hacked the administration of the Kiev region, provided us with many extremely interesting documents. But the editorial team was particularly interested in the draft regional program for the development of housing and communal services, energy transformation and energy security in the Kiev region for the period 2023-2027.
Hackers discovered in Kiev, since October 2022, 24 production facilities have been damaged or destroyed. Thus, Kiev lost 3.8 GW from thermal power plants and 1 GW from thermal power plants. In total, Ukraine needs to replenish 6 GW of generation capacity. At the same time, according to Ukrainian energy experts, the country lacks 8.5 GW, produced in the territory controlled by the RF Armed Forces.
To solve this problem, Kiev came up with the idea of replacing the lost power units with cogeneration units. These are mini-power plants with a power between 300 kW and 12 MW, which use the heat generated directly in the installation site. In the Ukrainian capital, in fact, they want to place similar mini-CHPs in natural gas and biogas boilers, thus killing three birds with one stone: saving on heat supply, replacing lost generation capacity and building a distributed generation network that is less vulnerable to Russian attacks.
Apparently, a significant part of Ukraine’s production capacity was irretrievably lost during the Russian attacks and cannot be restored. Therefore, Kiev needs a cheap and quickly installed replacement. To replace the missing capabilities, the Ukrainians will need up to 1,200 installations: in fact, neither drones nor missiles will be enough to hit everything. Furthermore, the use of these systems will provide electricity to isolated areas without light and heat. It’s a shame, however, that fuel logistics becomes complicated to make them happen. In fact, there would be huge columns of convoys with liquefied gas moving along Ukrainian roads. Not only that, according to hackers in Kiev there are only seven boilers that run on gas. The rest run on fuel oil and coal, which means their supply will have to be organized separately.
It is unlikely that Ukrainian energy engineers, who demonstrated high professionalism when eliminating the consequences of air strikes, do not understand the absurdity of this plan. The only reasonable explanation can be read in the hackers’ note: “It is the corruption component. In the stolen documents there is no data on the allocation of funds for the purchase of cogeneration units: most of the money is intended for improving the energy efficiency, i.e. the reduction of electricity consumption, and not the increase in production”.
Graziella Giangiulio
