Hacker attacks, new viruses, broken Internet and other computer troubles have become part of everyday life, an everyday topic akin to the weather. It is not only “high-tech” attackers who are to blame for the problems faced by ordinary owners of mobile phones and computers. Drunk excavator operators, careless electricians and incompetent telecommunications company employees can cause just as much damage as hackers.

DMITRY CHIZHOV

Malicious halves

Recently, thousands of Muscovites were able to witness an amazing sight: one fine evening, a giant street screen located on the Garden Ring began showing a porn film instead of advertising. The “erotic show” did not last long, but made a lot of noise. A criminal case was opened under the articles “illegal distribution of pornography” and “illegal access to computer information,” and the owners of the ill-fated screen had to admit that their network was attacked by hackers.

Hacker jokes are not always so harmless. In 2007, Sochi won the right to host the 2014 Winter Olympics - and almost immediately was left without the Internet. Unknown cybercriminals paralyzed the work of the Internet division of the Southern Telecommunications Company (the largest fixed-line operator in the Krasnodar Territory) for several days: hackers attacked the company’s resources from tens of thousands of infected computers around the world. Such an attack was not cheap for its customers, says a representative of a large Western manufacturer of telecommunications equipment: “The tariffs of the computer underground are as follows: an hour of attack from 1 thousand infected PCs costs about $400.” The head of the Russian office of Juniper Networks, Viktor Solodkov, notes that it is extremely difficult to repel such an attack, since it uses so-called legitimate traffic: an entire army of computers around the world makes completely legal attempts to access sites that connect to the outside world through a network of providers. Special provider systems (IDP) cannot catch and block such traffic.

Valery Andreev, director of science and development at IVK, states that hackers of information systems have recently been using know-how, which even professionals cannot fully protect against. “Imagine: e-mails with orders from the general director with a PDF file attached to them come to the mailboxes of company officials,” says Andreev. “In this file, half of the virus was disguised, and the second half was already waiting in the wings on the computers of the company’s employees. When this file was opened, the halves of the virus were combined, and the virus began its malicious activity." The gateway for the second half of the virus was the automatic software update system (Java update). The first half of the malicious program (“bomb”) was quietly leaked onto all machines through the antivirus and waited for the second half (“fuse”) to enter the system. “When analyzing this attack, it was discovered that the letters came from torrents, which complicates further searches for the attackers,” notes a representative of the IVK. According to him, this type of hacker attacks is new this season and has great prospects. “The algorithm for protecting against the penetration of viruses through updates has not yet been developed,” states Valery Andreev.

Stealing from simplicity

The ability of the heir to the American hotel empire Hilton to get into ridiculous stories has long been known. One of them occurred in 2005, when a hacker (later caught and convicted) gained access to Paris Hilton's mobile archive on the server of the cellular operator T-Mobile. The smartphone that the celebrity used had a backup function: the data in it could be synchronized with a stationary information storage (let's say you lose your cell phone, but all the data contained there is saved and can be loaded into a new device). The absurdity of the situation was that carefully reserved information was publicly available on the Internet, in particular private photographs of Paris, as well as her contact list - everyone found out the mobile numbers of Anna Kournikova, Christina Aguilera and other famous characters.

Illegal access to confidential information is not only a problem for glamorous divas. According to Perimetrix, in 2007 (this is the most recent statistics discovered by the author), 95% of Russian companies suffered from confidential data leaks. “The most common types of theft from companies are personal data (57%), details of specific transactions (47%) and financial reports (38%),” says the Perimetrix report. It is typical that in 75% of cases, confidential information was stolen on flash drives, and 58% of responding companies admitted that data was leaked from them via email.

According to Alexander Chachava, 80% of Internet failures are due to the incompetence of provider personnel
Photo: Grigory Sobchenko, Kommersant

It is difficult to calculate losses due to theft of personal data: no one knows for sure how many deals fell through because of insider leaks and how many families broke up after one half got into the other’s email inbox. According to Panda Software, in 2008, in the US alone, data leaks caused damage to companies and individuals in the amount of at least $1.5 billion. But the main thing is the time spent on eliminating the consequences of the dissemination of inside information. According to Panda Software, this takes 90 million man-hours in America.

Valery Andreev from IVK believes that a culture of handling confidential data has not yet been formed in Russia. People, without hesitation, plug flash drives with information recorded at home into their work computers and vice versa. At the same time, without knowing it, they add programs to the PC that steal this very data. “Home networks have serious holes in security systems - their users copy viruses via flash drives and disks and take them to work,” says Valery Andreev. “The masses do not yet have an adequate understanding of what a “secure network” means. As a rule, a computer on "locale" works poorly because it was infected and cleaned incorrectly. As a result, it continues to infect other computers."

Advice from experts to private users is banal at first glance. They recommend not using unverified and untrustworthy flash drives, disks and other media with any recorded information. In addition, experts advise choosing passwords more carefully: the name of your favorite hamster or a simple sequence of numbers is not suitable for protecting important information. However, ordinary users rarely follow these and other tips. According to the British company Imperva, the first three places in popularity among users are occupied by passwords 123456, 12345 and 123456789. In fourth place is the word password. Fifth - the phrase iloveyou written together. The sixth is the princess password. On the seventh - rockyou. Eighth and ninth places went to the digital combinations 1234567 and 12345678.

With a bucket at the ready

It's not just hackers and identity thieves that pose a threat to PC and Internet users. Compared to what employees of the local DEZ and the companies hired by them can do, any hacker attack will seem like petty hooliganism.

Recently, the house where the author of this material lives was left without electricity. An excavator operator hired to dig a trench to replace a water main caught a power cable with his bucket. The fireworks, as eyewitnesses say, were worthy of the New Year - but this did not make it any easier for the author’s relative, who was writing her thesis on the computer: the device suddenly turned off and buried a substantial piece of work.

A more serious case is the fire in 2003 at the Zamoskvoretsky hub of MGTS: tens of thousands of subscribers in Moscow were cut off from the telephone network for several weeks. Internet providers, whose equipment was located in the building of the burnt telephone exchange, suffered colossal losses then, and the damage to their clients, it seems, was also considerable. Subsequently, it turned out that this telecommunications terrorist attack was on the conscience of power engineers: a temporary electrical cable sagged under the weight of the snow adhering to it, became intertwined with the signalmen’s cable, and a short circuit occurred.

Another example of how vulnerable telecommunication systems are to energy lockouts is the consequences of the famous fire at the Chagino electrical substation on May 25, 2005. Let us remember that at that time half of Moscow was left without electricity; the Moscow region and part of the adjacent regions were also affected. MGTS also had troubles. It turned out that one of the country's largest telephone companies had only two backup diesel generators for the whole of Moscow. They tried to revive the switched-off Swedish and French telephone exchanges using generators supplied by the military. But it was not possible to connect delicate Western electronics with the developments of the Soviet military-industrial complex of the 1970s. Then, almost immediately, the main point of RuNet data exchange - the MMTS-9 (M9) facility on Butlerov Street - went down. It subsequently turned out that this strategically important point of the Russian Internet had no backup power supply at all.

“Energy supply remains one of the most serious problems, especially in large cities,” says Sergei Shcherbina, marketing director of the Service-Plus group of companies. “Any server computing systems are quite energy-intensive, since in addition to the server computing equipment itself there are various energy-consuming engineering solutions (air conditioning and refrigeration systems). Meanwhile, it is almost impossible to obtain a backup power channel in a large city."

Experts strongly recommend that ordinary users use uninterruptible power supplies (UPS). In the event of a power outage, these devices will keep your computer and monitor afloat long enough for you to be properly “saved.” “For ordinary users, a UPS that provides autonomous operation for 30 minutes is suitable, which allows you to finish working on your computer without loss,” says Alexander Chachava, president of the Leta group of companies. Computer stores usually recommend calculating the required UPS power using a factor of 1.7. Let's say your computer and monitor consume 400 W per pair, multiply by 1.7 - we get 680 W. Thus, a 700 W UPS will be sufficient.

Sometimes it is easier to protect yourself from hacker attacks than from vandalism by ordinary electricians.
Photo: Roman Yarovitsyn, Kommersant

Trouble we didn't expect

The danger for owners of PCs and mobile gadgets is not only from network robbers, energy workers and their own carelessness. It happens that employees of companies that provide computers and Internet access become the source of trouble. About seven years ago, the author of this material decided to connect to the regional network. On Saturday evening, half an hour after the call, two installers came to him, and another half hour later a dedicated line to the computer was installed. Only there was no Internet in it. “Our employee got drunk at his aunt’s in Yegoryevsk, so wait until the beginning of the week,” one of the installers said after talking to someone on the phone. It must have been a good walk in Yegoryevsk: the Internet didn’t work for another ten days. Laugh with laughter, however, as Alexander Chachava says, 80% of Internet failures are due precisely to the incompetence of provider personnel. Also, according to him, if these personnel know the basics of information security, the damage caused by information leaks and hacker attacks is reduced by a factor of ten.

It is dangerous to skimp on maintaining complex systems. Ivan Nechaev, executive director of the Russian Navigation Technologies company, citing the experience of implementing a transport monitoring system, notes: “The risk arises as soon as the system is operational. Inept maintenance and reconfiguration of the system by untrained employees, transfer of this work to local “craftsmen” may well be the cause failures."

Perhaps, soon in Moscow there will be justice for careless providers. A commission is being formed at the mayor's office, whose task is a total audit of Internet and cable TV networks. The prelude to its creation was an inspection carried out by the Moscow Housing Inspectorate, the Department of Transport and Communications and other city departments in almost 500 houses in the capital. The list of violations identified by the audit included laying cables through garbage chutes and elevator shafts, transferring them from house to house through windows, and legally illiterate agreements between providers and organizations operating buildings. It is expected that the new commission will receive rich powers, including the order to dismantle the network assembled “on the knee”.

In addition to the networks with Internet access deployed here and there, there is also a domestic source of threat to your information security - when your neighbors use uncertified radio-emitting equipment. For example, radiotelephones, which, according to some sellers, “hit” almost 20 km from the base station connected to a regular telephone socket. This device comes into your life something like this: you watch TV (the signal to which today often goes through a “cord” to access the Internet), and suddenly the sound and image disappear. Then they return - after the technologically advanced neighbor has spoken on an uncertified tube.

Telecommunications experts emphasize that in such a situation, only contacting the authorities can help you out. Informal measures of influence (a fight with a neighbor and the elimination of a long-range telephone are not considered options) most likely will not help here. And contacting the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, IT and Mass Communications will help. Employees of this service are authorized to search for radio hooligans, fine them and confiscate illegal equipment.

User surrounded by enemies