Techworm has long predicted that the future wars are going to be fought online rather than by army, navy and air force. And countries round the globe are gearing up to tackle this rising menace. US and its allies already have dedicated cyber crime fighting units up and running. China and India have also announced setting up of special cyber cells to counter the growing threat from cyber criminals. Today Russia announced its roadmap for creating special dedicated CyberWarfare units.
A top senior military commander of Russia to spelt out the plans being undertaken by the Russian government to create special cyber-defense units to protect the country against online warfare in the coming years. As per Major-General Yuri Kuznetsov of Russian Army, the cyberwarfare units are being formed “to defend the Russian armed forces’ critical infrastructure from computer attacks,”
Kuznetsov added that the roadmap for formation of the units will be 2017 and it will be completed in stages. That Russia was already planning a CyberWarfare unit was already known in the cyber world. In the month of August, 2013, a senior Defense Ministry spokesperson confirmed there were plans to train cyberwarfare units. But at that point of time the Defence Ministry had refused to give any time line for its activation.
A month earlier, in July, 2013, the Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that the army must heavily recruit new programmers to meet the rising need for military software.
Russia has been a target of cyber attacks over the past few years from the cyber criminals and the Russian computer experts had suggested in the past that the Russian government actively cooperated with hacker groups operating in the country to counter the cyber criminal activities.
Alexei Moshkov, the head of the country’s cybercrimes Bureau of Special Technical Measures, said Thursday that his agency thwarted hacker attacks which could have led to a loss of around $ 28 million to the Russian government and citizens. Moshkov added that this very second, 12 people around the world become victims of hacking and the attacks are mostly on financial targets.
In a breaking news on the same subject, Russian newspaper Vedomosti’s website was downed by hackers using DDoS attack on Thursday. The website was down for almost all of Thursday.
