Maybe those ever-so-secretive Russian hackers aren’t nearly as clever as we, or they, thought.
A 2011 presentation by Canada’s NSA equivalent described the Russian hacking system MAKERSMARK as “designed by geniuses” but “implemented by morons.”
According to the report, recently obtained by the Intercept, Canadian counterintelligence was able to trace a slew of online attacks to Russia despite the hackers’ sophisticated system of track-covering countermeasures. This was because while they were online, the hackers also checked personal email and social media accounts. Canadian officials were able to determine individual hackers’ “interests” and “hobbies.”
They were so compromised they fell victim to the worldwide “Gumblar” botnet virus in 2009, which pushed pharmaceutical spam.
The Scrapbook likes to imagine what sort of messages the Kremlin’s computer guerillas had to wade through each morning before settling in to a long day of spear-phishing Western politicos and businesses: “Boris! Click here to lern the 7 secrets makers of Viagra are not wanting you to know.” And “Ivan! Your AOL account has being compromatized! Click here to log on at AOL.kp for resetting of passwerd.”
