True enough.Little stoned kiwi wrote:Governments, corporations, political parties, and individuals across the entire spectrum are spreading misinformation and disinformation on such a large scale that a few data-centres being taken out wouldn't touch the sides of it.
But I guess the gist of the accusation was more qualitative than quantitative. Not that all trolls everywhere disappeared - that is, of course, a decentralised impossibility - but that a particular brand of far-right troll, promoting MAGA, the AfD and such.
And though some Brexiteers were moaning, the intelligence agencies came out and confirmed (for a second time, really, as it has been mentioned before, at the time, but was overlooked completely, as Brexiteers were in charge of the government) that Burnham was right to say that Russia had targeted the Brexit referendum to cause trouble and division.
Because, again, the accusation isn't that these data centres originate all trolls, but more that these are where Russia's targeted misinformation campaigns originate from, so silencing them had a notable impact on a particular brand of far-right commentary.
Also, I used to run a cluster of servers, so I've seen the patterns. From Asia and Eastern Europe, you get people probing for open email servers to act as relays for their spam efforts - these people are trying to find a "legitimate" European email address to send out all the Viagra, "I am a Nigerian Prince" and other such bollocks. But they're only going for email ports.
But then you see the more worrying attacks - they're probing all your ports, testing your defences, trying known vulnerabilities against your server in the hopes you haven't patched it yet, etc. - and those come from Russian IP addresses. Those are the ones to be actually worried about - because Putin doesn't want a spam relay, he wants sneak bots onto every European server his operatives can sneak their way onto, and I believe the long-term plan is to infect enough European infrastructure and businesses that he has a "cyber bomb" at his beck and call.
And I do wonder, following the news, when we've had major infrastructure outages, he's just testing that it all works. Ready for the real "cyber bomb" where they send out a code to all their sleeping bots to knock out as much of the Internet as they can, all at once.
This is also different because I've seen that traffic for myself - watching what was trying to hit my servers and tracking what was going on and which IP addresses they were coming from (granted, I'm only ever seeing the final IP address and it could be relayed from somewhere else) and there's a clear pattern. Asia (including South Asia - that is, India) wants spam relays to make scam money. But Russian IP addresses are going after servers and trying to crack their way in.
I'm in a different job now and those servers I managed have been retired, but the thing I was never sure of - did any of these attacks actually succeed?
I'll never know. Because, as I say, what these Russian crackers seemed to be after was to silently drop "payloads" onto servers. Get a "back door" into the server. Not to bring them down, but just to have them sitting there, ready and waiting, reporting back data and waiting for a "self-destruct" code to be sent.
