Russia Uses Expendable Hackers

We have known since the beginning of the war with Ukraine that Russian soldiers are expendable and useful as “canon fodder”.

Now we are learning that so are their hackers.

Well, actually, the Russian hackers are recruiting foreigners to do the dirty work for them so that they can be arrested instead.

In one case, Russian hackers recruited Dutch nationals. They were recruited by the Russian hackers over Telegram, which is often exploited by hackers.

The Dutch kids were arrested for sniffing the WiFi networks at key locations in The Hague. One particular sniffing route included the Canadian embassy, Europol (police) and Eurojust (justice department).

One of the kids was arrested, at home, while doing his homework, by eight men wearing face coverings. They had a search warrant , seized electronic equipment and took the boy away.

This appears to be part of a growing trend of recruiting naive people to commit vandalism or filming critical government infrastructure. These people are disposable.

Or worse. They are also recruiting people to perform odd jobs (like Task Rabbit?) like delivering improvised explosive devices. In these cases, the kids recruited are unwitting suicide bombers.

Of course, Russia is denying all of this, but that is the whole point – plausible deniability. Credit: Hackread

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