Russian President Vladimir Putin decreed last week the creation of a government system capable of anticipating, preventing, and assisting in the aftermath of cyber-attacks on national IT resources. The Federal Security Service (FSB), the post-Soviet successor of the KGB, will be responsible for the project.
In addition to warding off cyber-raids, the prospective system is expected to forecast potentially threatening scenarios for information security in Russia and ensure the nation’s “critical IT infrastructure” is safeguarded sufficiently against possible “computer assaults.” A timeframe for completing the task has yet to be specified.
There is strong evidence to suggest that hackers now defy borders and the hunt for highly classified data has assumed an international dimension. Putin’s decree came just days after Kaspersky Lab, a major IT security firm, identified an elusive cyber espionage network that has targeted governments and R&D hubs in several countries. Pointedly dubbed ‘Red October,’ the network of cybercriminals might have its origins in a Russian-speaking country.
Talking to ComNews.ru, a Russian source of IT news, Bogdan Vovchenko of Group-IB, a Russian cybercrime investigator, said the decree represents a crucial and timely decision “in an environment where information technologies are widely tapped by criminals, extremist organizations, and foreign espionage services.” Vadim Zdor of InfoWatch, another Russian computer security company, underscored that losing any strategic infrastructure project currently controlled with IT to a cyber-raid could have ruinous implications “comparable to war damages.”
It will take some time before we know whether President Putin will opt for a broad-based expert consortium to help the FSB develop such a system or if he will give the FSB free rein, thus potentially unleashing again the sort of heavy-handedness, considered ‘par for the course,’ which the FSB revealed last year, when it sought to foil Western bloggers’ attempts to influence Russian politics.
