Russia’s war on The Ukraine election has drawn global attention this week with Russian President Vladimir Putin continuing to escalate the conflict as the United States and Europe move to drastically isolate the Kremlin. Although the front lines of the battle have not been digital, Ukraine has highlighted this week that Russia is hitting the beleaguered country’s computer networks with hacking attempts. After years of such activity, Ukraine’s Internet infrastructure is resilient, and the Ukrainian government is also experimenting with forming a volunteer “IT army” to organize recruits from around the world to its cause.
Ukrainians rely on the Telegram messaging platform to get much of their news and official government updates on the situation, and hacktivists are also trying to make their mark on the conflict, although their actions are often downplayed by the reality of kinetic warfare.
We have the story of an online troll using tactics like misleading press releases and dodgy domain names in an attempt to sabotage competitors in the soft spirits industry. And startup Kytch, which sold an ice cream machine repair device to McDonald’s before the fast-food giant crushed its business, is suing Golden aAches for $900 million in damages.
But wait, there’s more. Here, we’ve rounded up all the news we haven’t broken or covered in depth this week. Click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.
US internet infrastructure company Cogent Communications said on Friday it was ending its relationship with its Russian customers, including state-owned Russian telecoms Rostelecom and TransTelekom. The global internet is interdependent and Russia has other major providers besides Cogent to connect the world, but the company is one of the biggest. Cogent said it weighed the risks of some people in Russia losing global connectivity against the possibility that the Russian government could use Cogent’s services to orchestrate disinformation campaigns and hacks against Ukrainian targets. “Our goal is not to hurt anyone. This is just to prevent the Russian government from having another tool in its war chest,” said Cogent CEO Dave Schaefer The Washington Post.
The infamous Conti ransomware gang was long believed to be based in Russia, and last week the group announced its support for the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine. Since then, the Conti has suffered a series of damaging leaks. A Twitter user with the pseudonym @ContiLeaks leaked about 60,000 messages from internal Conti chats on Sunday, revealing details of the organization’s inner workings, including how the group recruits and trains members. @ContiLeaks then released a second collection that included over 100,000 more internal messages and files related to access to the group’s APIs and source code. By Wednesday, researchers began noticing that Conti was dismantling its infrastructure. It’s not unusual for ransomware groups to go underground and re-establish themselves under a new name, but the saga shows the severity of the backlash Conti received from pro-Ukraine hacktivists.
After a ransomware attack last week, chip maker Nvidia is struggling to deal with attackers who apparently stole 1 terabyte of data from the company and are slowly leaking increasingly sensitive data from the find. The hacking group known as Lapsus$, believed to be based in South America, also claimed that Nvidia tried to “hack” or attack them in retaliation. Earlier this week, attackers leaked information about unreleased, upcoming Nvidia GPUs and the source code for an Nvidia AI rendering system called DLSS. After the company refused to pay a ransom to the attackers, they released the usernames and passwords of more than 71,000 Nvidia employees on Friday along with two code-signing certificates that could be misused by other attackers around the world to make their malware look authentic and trustworthy.
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