that whoever has done this can do it again to agencies anywhere in the world
Well, that is how “IT” is.
You never actually know for sure that your phone, your PC, your email system, whatever, has not been hacked. I don’t know this for sure, for any of the systems I look after. The only way to be sure is to have no internet connection (which is feasible in many cases of disastrous hacking, but tends to be a lot less convenient). And you have to keep backups (offline backups, obviously) so you can restore a system which somebody has trashed.
IT admin is really hard to do well. Most people working in it are just amateur brain surgeons. A lot of them are not very clever, and the Russians running that airline database probably were quite stupid, as well as having a thoroughly penetrated security. One UK ski site got hacked recently, with a theft of passport scans (yes, why even store passport data, on a forum??) and they revealed their server was last updated in 2004! This is just normal in IT… Russia is a thoroughly corrupt and dysfunctional country, and this shows up in their armed forces too (in this case, fortunately).
And if you assume that every router, firewall, etc has back doors, you will be right 99% of the time. EuroGA gets attacked roughly 5 times per second. It has not been trashed because it was set up by an expert, is not open-source, and is running on a fairly up to date server. But would we store passport details (like for GAR forms)? No way. But airlines do…
I used to write both SITA and AFTN messages with a real telex, even one without memory in the beginning. They were slow cumbersome but they worked!
Yes, but the data rate is very slow, and AFTN messages are not free. I think that was a joke.
so the cheering may well freeze once they decide to take down someone else.
It is a lesson, for sure. My comment about USSR hosting was a joke, btw 
As for the war itself, it appears Russian forces are withdrawing from the Kiew area. It is questionable why they do this. Clearly, the wishful thinking is they are withdrawing due to a strategy change which focuses on Donbass and possibly the occupied areas on the black sea coast.
As of that, some of the talking heads see a possibility that Ukraine will be separated into two parts like NK and SK, the Donbass provinces plus the Black Sea coast up to the Crimea in Russian hands and the rest remains into Ukrainian hands, with clear pre-conditions such as a ban on a NATO membership, Neutrality and possibly the employment of peace keeping troops. Apparently the question of an EU membership appears not to be a non starter for the Russians.
It appears that Ukraine starts to realize they won’t get Donbass or Crimea back, no matter what. Selenski has recently mentioned that trying to get back the Donbass provinces would result in WWIII. So it appears they are starting to resign themselves that they won’t get peace unless they give up those areas.
Of course the other possibility is they are factually evacuating their troops from around Kiew in order to employ other kind of warfare in that area, such as chemical or nuclear weapons and don’t want their own people fried. Unfortunately one can never exclude anything.
Another “interesting” development is the information that Roman Abramovic has been part of the negotiating team and as that was exposed to something like nerve poison. Interesting in both parts as that Abramovic certainly has all the interest to stop this war as he is targeted by the sanctions but also that his views may have upset some of the literally toxic guys in the Kremlin.
It remains to be seen where this thing goes. I hope for the best but expect the worst (as the saying by Mel Brooks goes)
Mooney_Driver wrote:
If they can take down a whole CAA in a country which has produced some of the better known IT protection softwares
You have to remember their CAA’s IT team are not the same people who have produced their security software.
If you were living there, with the smarts and knowledge to write good security software…would you work for the CAA for peanuts, or run a startup firm with a reward many orders of magnitude larger?
Peter wrote:
This is a real gem:
information exchange will be carried out via AFTN channel (for urgent short message) and postal mail.
In the original Russian text, this gem is even better: “via AFTN (for urgent short messages), military couriers and postal mail”.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Imho what is noteworthy out of the context is, that whoever has done this can do it again to agencies anywhere in the world. And some of those organisations have not exactly been aviation friendly but rather been cooperating with eco-fascist or socialist political groups. This capability is frightening.
Maybe you are right, but Russian governmental agencies are notorious for appalling IT security practices. Russian private IT companies have an unwritten rule: candidates who have any governmental jobs in their CV are automatically disqualified. Not for political reasons, mind you, merely because most governmental websites or applications in Russia are textbook examples of how not to write software.
not the same people who have produced their security software.
I have dumped Kaspersky AV from all machines I run, due to
)Russian governmental agencies are notorious for appalling IT security practices
This operation probably had hundreds of people with admin access and long ago lost track of who had the credentials. This is a problem everywhere. People also hand out logins to friends. There is an aviation organisation not too far from where I am which has handed out logins to their pilot database, to favoured outsiders…
Mooney_Driver wrote:
I used to write both SITA and AFTN messages with a real telex, even one without memory in the beginning. They were slow cumbersome but they worked!
In the days where you still had real briefing offices with real briefing officers, I had a flight plan entered on a Telex machine. This was actually as late as ≈1990 at a major Swedish airport. In order to not hold up the Telex line, the BO first made a punched tape offline… At this time all Swedish ATC had already been computerised so I was quite surprised that old-style AFTN was still being used.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Of course the other possibility is they are factually evacuating their troops from around Kiew in order to employ other kind of warfare in that area, such as chemical or nuclear weapons and don’t want their own people fried.
So far they have shown very little concern for they own troops, so why start now?
Mooney_Driver wrote:
As for the war itself, it appears Russian forces are withdrawing from the Kiew area. It is questionable why they do this. Clearly, the wishful thinking is they are withdrawing due to a strategy change which focuses on Donbass and possibly the occupied areas on the black sea coast.
My take on it is that Russian forces are regrouping / refitting / resupplying whilst Russian leaders give the illusion of progress in peace talks to play for time while all this happens.
The Ukrainians should not hold in place and expect a peace deal, they should chase every Russian unit back to the border inflicting maximum damage and casualties. Everything they allow to leave rather than destroy will be back eventually, but I’m sure they know this.
Fortunately the rhetoric of western leaders is clear – treat everything coming from the Russian regime as being in bad faith, always. What the west has to be prepared to do is to treat Russia with bad faith in return – play them at their own game. This probably means doing some sort of deal around Ukrainian neutrality and then when Russia is preoccupied with something else reneging on it and admitting Ukraine to NATO. Whatever might be agreed won’t hold in the long term, because it’ll involve the thoroughly unsatisfactory state of affairs of Ukraine having restrictions placed on what it does as a sovereign nation due to threat of violence from its despotic neighbour. There can be no real peace here without Russian defeat, for the same reason that WW2 couldn’t end with a bit of haggling over territory.
The concept of ‘neutrality’ is BS in this context anyway. What Putin means by neutral is ‘under his sphere of influence’.
So far they have shown very little concern for they own troops
This will be one of the enduring symbols of this war. A WW2 tank, hurriedly covered in reactive armour bricks, parked next to somebody’s house, blown up like it was 1.6mm aluminium, probably with a $100k missile entering from above and carried by one man, and inevitably wrecking the houses around it
and an endless stream of the same, around 700 now and counting.
My take on it is that Russian forces are regrouping / refitting / resupplying whilst Russian leaders give the illusion of progress in peace talks to play for time while all this happens.
The Ukrainians should not hold in place and expect a peace deal, they should chase every Russian unit back to the border inflicting maximum damage and casualties. Everything they allow to leave rather than destroy will be back eventually, but I’m sure they know this.
Absolutely.
The concept of ‘neutrality’ is BS in this context anyway
It always was.
In WW2, neutrality meant collaboration with whoever ended up next door holding a big stick.
In the cold war, same thing. If somebody escaped from the USSR into Finland, they got sent straight back to be jailed or shot. You had to cross Finland and get into Norway.
How fast have times changed! 1 month ago, this was unthinkable. The political changes in “W” Europe, the sudden solidarity.
Are they WW2 tanks? I thought they’re T-72s?
But yes may as well be WW2 tech compared to e.g. Challenger or Abrams. However it’s not tank-to-tank warfare, the main difference is things like NLAW, AT4 and Javelin which will just straight-up knock out any Russian armour they hit. Prior to this generation of man-portable anti-tank weapons taking out an MBT was a dicey affair and you really needed to hit it in the rear to stand a chance.
