But that protest quickly fizzled: The attacked media sent a warning to the host through which Mediaactivist.ru had been operating, and the Web site was removed from the Internet for spam activity.
On October 16, 2005, another Web site, called Internet Underground Community vs. Terrorism (
www.peace4peace.com
), was established and began to launch denial of service attacks on Kavkaz-Tsentr. In a statement the hackers said: “We are hackers of different specialties. Most of us have long been on the other side of the law, but that does not mean we are not patriots who will stand up for peace in the world.”
20
The efforts carried out by Russian diplomacy and unofficial hackers were partly successful. In May 2006 the Swedish authorities closed Kavkaz-Tsentr. The Web site was moved first to Georgia and in 2008 to Estonia.
In April 2007, for the first time, Web sites of a foreign government came under attack. Estonia had angered the Kremlin with its decision to move a Soviet war memorial out of the center of the capital. After a massive nationalistic campaign against Estonia in the Russian press, on April 27 Russian hackers launched a series of cyber attacks on the Web sites of the Estonian government, parliament, banks, ministries, newspapers, and broadcasters. Most of the attacks were the “denial of service” type. The attackers ranged from single individuals, using various low-tech methods like ping floods (a simple denial-of-service attack in which an attacker overwhelms the victim computer with echo request [ping] packets), to expensive rented botnets usually used for spam distribution. Russia denied any involvement, but Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet accused the Kremlin of direct involvement in the cyber attacks, and Estonia then requested and received NATO assistance in responding to this new form of aggression.
21
Who exactly was behind the attack was never publicly acknowledged. Estonia failed to present proof of the Russian government’s involvement, and in September 2007 the country’s defense minister admitted he had no evidence linking cyber attacks to the Russian authorities. “Of course, at the moment, I cannot state for certain that the cyber attacks were managed by the Kremlin or other Russian government agencies,” Jaak Aaviksoo said in interview on Estonian’s Kanal 2 TV channel.
22
Meanwhile, Rafal Rohozhinsky, a leading expert in the field, argued that he had seen signs of government sponsorship in the malicious traffic. He pointed to armies of hijacked computers that started and stopped attacks in exact coordination at one-week intervals, implying that they had been rented for the purpose.
23
In the end, the Russian state was never blamed, and no diplomatic measures ensued.
In June 2008, Lithuania was in the crosshairs. The former Soviet republic incensed Russia when lawmakers voted to ban public display of Nazi German and Soviet symbols. Lithuania’s stance prompted a massive cyber attack: On June 30 the National Communication Regulator’s office said that some three hundred Web sites, including those of public institutions such as the National Ethics body and the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as a string of private companies, had found themselves under cyber siege. Their Web sites’ content was replaced with images of the red flag of the Soviet Union alongside anti-Lithuanian slogans.
24
In August 2008, the military conflict with Georgia in South Ossetia also included cyber attacks against Georgia’s Internet infrastructure. According to a Project Grey Goose report,
f
members of two Russian forums, StopGeorgia.ru and Xakep.ru,“spent a significant amount of time discussing the merits and drawbacks of different kinds of malware, including DDoS tactics and tools. . . . An analysis of the DDoS tools offered by the forum leaders showed basic but effective tools. Some forum members had difficulty using the tools, reinforcing the idea that many of the forum members had low to medium technical sophistication.”
25
The attacks compromised several Georgian government Web sites and prompted the government to switch to hosting locations in the United States. Georgia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in order to disseminate real-time information, was forced to move to a BlogSpot account.
26
IN 2007, Informacia.ru began to attract more attention. It appears to have been used both by hackers and by security services. When in May 2007 Soldatov published a story in
Novaya Gazeta
about the unofficial hackers, the community responded on Informacia.ru. Two years later, in July 2009, the Informacia.ru site was used against a British diplomat. Britain’s deputy consul general in Yekaterinburg, James Hudson, was forced to resign when the
Sun
tabloid in London published excerpts of a video showing a man resembling Hudson having sex with two prostitutes. The 4-minute, 18-second video first appeared July 6 on Informacia.ru and was picked up by
Komsomolskaya Pravda
in Yekaterinburg and the tabloid Web site Life.ru. The
Sun
published a story about it on July 9, the same day Hudson stepped down.
27
The authors do not know precisely how the video reached Informacia.ru. Russia has had a long tradition of using compromising material to carry such out attacks—called
kompromat—
but it is highly unusual for one to be aimed at a diplomat.
One month later, U.S. diplomat Kyle Hatcher was featured in another such video, also published by Informacia.ru and reprinted by
Komsomolskaya Pravda
. In Hatcher’s case, the diplomat was not forced to leave: The U.S. ambassador stood up for his employee, while the FBI conducted an investigation and declared the footage fake. The State Department called the video a fabricated montage that included some real footage: “Mr. Hatcher has been the subject of a smear campaign in the Russian press and on the Internet to discredit him and his work,” said State Department spokesman Ian Kelly. “We deplore this type of smear campaign.”
28
Informacia.ru was known earlier for its ties to secret services. Prominent human rights activist and Soviet dissident Sergei Grigoryants told the authors that he was surprised to see that his biography published on the site contained details unavailable from open sources.
In 2008, the community that had once created
Anticenter.org
launched a new Web site, Antiterror.tv. It boasted that it had closed down two hundred Web sites and tracked down the Internet locations of one hundred authors of illegal Web sites, which they had turned over to the FSB.
The appearance of the antiterror group is proof that unofficial hackers have become part of the Russian cyberwar front lines. By allowing militantly nationalist citizens to respond to Russia’s enemies with cyberwarfare, the security services succeed in keeping distance between themselves and the perpetrating factions while accomplishing their greater goals.
CONCLUSION
I
N THE EARLY years of the KGB’s reorganization after the Soviet collapse, the Federal Counterintelligence Service (FSK) existed for only a short while. In 1995, the FSK was renamed the Federal Security Service, or FSB. The shift from “K” to “B” was more than symbolic; the renamed service was given a broad mandate to become the guardian of “security” for the new Russia. Fifteen years on, it is possible to draw some conclusions about Russia’s security and how well it has been served by its security apparatus.
The largest single challenge facing the FSB and Russia in the decade of Vladimir Putin’s rule was the tide of terrorist attacks from the North Caucasus. After the Nord-Ost siege, the FSB called the storming of the Dubrovka theater a victory, hoping to stave off the next calamity. But when the next attack occurred two years later at the Beslan school, the security service leadership utterly failed to take decisive action—indeed, failed to even arrive at the scene.
While the FSB insisted that the conflict in Chechnya was inflamed and supported by hostile foreign forces, in truth, the Chechens’ most damaging tactics were conceived of by Chechen warlords. Russia’s security services appear to have miscalculated the nature of the enemy in the battle against terrorism. Faced with guerrilla warfare, the security services responded in kind, carrying out operations to eliminate a generation of Chechen warlords and leaders, including Aslan Maskhadov, Shamil Basayev, and Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev. But when these leaders were wiped out, new ones took their place. To date, Russia’s security services have failed to find an effective way to deal with terrorism.
This failure was underscored once again on Monday, March 29, 2010, when two female suicide bombers detonated explosives on Moscow’s subway during rush hour. The first bomb exploded at 7:56 A.M. as a train rolled into the Lubyanka station, just a short walk from the FSB headquarters—a bombing that appeared to be aimed directly at the security service. Then, at 8:39 A.M., a second bomb was detonated on the platform at the Park Kultury station, near the famous Gorky Park. As a result, forty people were killed and eighty-four wounded.
The FSB claimed the bombings were revenge attacks for the insurgents killed by FSB squads in the North Caucasus earlier in the month. But the claim seemed to be dubious; such terrorist operations often take months to plan, and the insurgents had promised nearly two years earlier to inflict terror on Russia’s cities and civilians. The bombings also raised anew an important question that had been asked following the Nord-Ost siege and Beslan massacre: If the secret services had been given so much support by the Kremlin in the name of providing security, why had they failed again to prevent such a deadly onslaught? The bombings clearly exposed the weakness of the FSB’s shoot-to-kill policy in the North Caucasus, but neither the FSB nor the Kremlin showed any inclination to change direction. Putin declared that the “terrorists will be eliminated,” while Medvedev called bombers animals and stated: “I have no doubt that we will find and destroy them all.”
1
When Putin was elected president in 2000, the security services, chiefly the FSB, rose to prominence with him, hoping for a resurrection from the long decade of the 1990s, when they had felt left out of the tumultuous new capitalism and uncertain politics. Putin, who had been an officer in the KGB for sixteen years, effectively invited the security services to take their place at the head table of power and prestige in Russia. But this invitation to join the New Nobility of Russia failed to bring the expected results, given the trust the Kremlin put in the security services.
The FSB invested energy in hunting down foreign spies, but the unseemly methods it used to do so raised questions about whether the threat was real or trumped-up. Likewise, the FSB targeted nongovernmental organizations out of fear that such groups might inspire a popular revolution against the Kremlin. This was a clear miscalculation; the organizations in question were too small to be significant threats, did not command widespread support in Russia, and did not advocate an uprising against the regime.
Putin opened the door to many dozens of security service agents to move up in the main institutions of the country, perhaps hoping they would prove a vanguard of stability and order. But once they had tasted the benefits, agents began to struggle amongst themselves for the spoils.
The FSB faced a profound challenge when Putin was accused of involvement in the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings as an effort to panic the population and successfully rise to power. While it is not known precisely who was behind the bombings, it is clear the FSB attempted to silence questions about the case in a way that only provoked further conspiracy theories.
Under Boris Yeltsin’s presidency in the 1990s attempts to build civil society emerged along with the hope of an improved connection between the rulers and the ruled. But Putin deliberately attempted to roll back civil society, reducing the space for discussion in politics and public life. The security services meddled in politics to protect Putin, perhaps to demonstrate their power and loyalty to the Kremlin, or perhaps because they misjudged the threat of any opposition to the popular president.
The FSB was supposed to be a cog in the machinery of a state governed by the rule of law. But the rule of law remains a quite distant goal in today’s Russia, where the security services appear to have concluded that their interests, and those of the state they are guarding, remain above the law. The mind-set of Russia’s FSB has been undeniably shaped by Soviet and Tsarist history: It is suspicious, inward looking, and clannish.
Clearly, the times demand change. But the answers do not lie in the lessons of the past. Yuri Andropov’s plaque may make the security services feel better about their identity, but it does not point to an efficient model in a modern democracy. Reaping lucrative property in the elite forests of the Rublyovka may comfort generals nearing the end of their careers but does not prepare a new generation to become fair arbiters and respected enforcers in a democratic society. While Putin awarded generals more privileges and benefits, they retreated from risk and responsibility and thus proved less than effective in their duties, leading to lasting questions about their role in Russia’s future. If President Medvedev is serious about modernizing Russia and ending the “legal nihilism” that has run wild in recent years, he will need defenders of the state who are in tune with this goal, not a service deeply mired in the past.