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The wars of the 21st century aren't merely fought on physical front lines and battlefields. They're also fought in cyberspace. Dedicated armies of elite hackers and cyber warfare commands carry out an array of offensive and defensive digital operations, from espionage to infrastructure disruption and information warfare against their enemies. Many of the world's major powers engage in these activities, including the United States, China, Israel, and the United Kingdom. The vast majority of these nations, however, have strict limits and rules in regard to how
they recruit, train, and deploy their hacking talents. Russia, however, follows no such rules or moral codes. Its Federal Security Service (FSB) actively enlists the worst of the worst, recruiting criminal hackers to its ranks rather than sending them to jail. Scammers. Carders. Malware developers. Ransomware operators. Hacking groups that find exploits in company networks to breach their defenses and illegally steal trade secrets and sensitive data. These are the kinds of people that Vladimir Putin described as "artists" during the 2017 edition of Russia's annual Saint
Petersburg International Economic Forum, stating: "They are like artists. If they are in a good mood, they get up in the morning and begin painting their pictures. Hackers are the same. They wake up in the morning, they read about some developments in international affairs, and if they have a patriotic mindset, then they try to make their own contribution the way they consider right into the fight against those who have bad things to say about Russia." Interestingly, during that very same speech, Putin also claimed that Russia was "not engaged in [hacking] on the state level
and we are not going to. On the contrary, we are trying to fight against it inside the country." But, like a lot of the things that come out of Putin's mouth, this was, of course, a blatant lie. Even if the Kremlin does its best to cover up its illicit actions, there are literally reams of evidence to prove that it doesn't merely engage in state-sponsored hacking, but has no qualms whatsoever when it comes to hiring hackers who have a proven track record of illegal and wholly immoral activities. This isn't how most countries conduct their cyber warfare operations. In the US,
for example, cybersecurity experts can apply for roles as government hackers with agencies like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or the Department of Homeland Security. The application process is complex, involving detailed background checks and challenging exams to separate the best from the rest. In China, meanwhile, the government often prefers to rely on headhunting to find the most talented individuals from the country's leading IT firms. Even in countries that may be considered somewhat less scrupulous and more corrupt, like Iran and
North Korea, there are clear procedures in place; the military may play a role in recruiting and training gifted IT experts, for example, or child prodigies may be offered positions at elite science and technology schools and placed on intensive computer programming courses. The methods vary, but there are, at least, always certain rules in place. In Russia, however, it seems that there's only one rule that really matters: don't do anything against the state. As long as hackers obey that rule, focusing their efforts on targeting entities in other countries
around the world, rather than Russian banks, businesses, or the Kremlin itself, then they're effectively allowed to do whatever they want and get away with it, with some even being rewarded with FSB positions and perks. This is more or less how it's been for decades, dating all the way back to the early days of the internet. In the 1990s, for example, Russia already had quite a broad hacking community, and many Russian hackers might have been described as rebels or free spirits. Many were anti-establishment, similar to hackers in other countries across the globe, and eager to
use their unique sets of skills to promote the free movement of information. Then, however, a major historical event occurred that would change the face of the Russian hacking scene, forever. That event was the Second Chechen War. In August 1999, Islamist Mujahidin fighters from Chechnya carried out armed incursions into the Russian Republic of Dagestan to support separatist rebels in the region. They hoped to form a united Dagestan and Chechnya that would operate under an Islamic government and expel all Russians from the area. The Russian government intervened, and
a brief battle took place, with the sheer weight of the Russian military proving too much for the rebels and separatists to cope with. The conflict could have ended there. But in September 1999, a series of apartment bombings took place in four Russian cities, killing hundreds of civilians. Despite some inconsistencies and mysteries surrounding these events, as well as a distinct lack of proof linking the bombings to the Chechen rebels, the Russian Prime Minister at the time, Vladimir Putin himself, used these incidents as a pretext to begin a full-scale invasion of Chechnya
and claim full control of the region. And so began a bloody battle that would last nearly a decade, with tens of thousands of casualties, ultimately culminating in Russia establishing control and installing its own government in Chechnya. Naturally, with Russian TV channels showing the aftermath of the apartment bombings and national newspaper headlines blaming these atrocities on Chechen rebels, a large part of the Russian population was outraged and fully supported the Kremlin's military actions. Some even took their support to the next level. A group of hackers,
for example, calling themselves the "Siberian Network Brigade," decided to begin their own cyber warfare campaign against Chechen forces. Founded by a Tomsk Polytechnic student named Dmitry Alexandrov, the seven-man team used relatively rudimentary hacking techniques to cause chaos on Chechen websites. They mainly relied on distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks, for example, which involve sending large numbers of requests to a particular website in order to overload its servers and cause it to stop working. They also carried out defacement attacks,
which involved gaining administrative access to certain websites and changing their appearance or contents. Russian media at the time routinely reported on the group's actions, which included defacing the homepage of the "Caucasus Center" website, which carried messages from Chechen militants directed at their followers, supporters, and potential recruits. Chechen media, meanwhile, argued that, due to the scale of these attacks, they likely weren't the work of independent amateurs but a state-sponsored group. Indeed, they even accused the Russian FSB of carrying out the
attacks. This was never conclusively proven, one way or another, but it was the first major case of Russia's Security Service being associated in some way with criminal hackers. It certainly wouldn't be the last. Indeed, as the 90s came to an end and the new millennium began, various other Russian hacking groups and lone wolves began to emerge, developing new techniques and tools to make their attacks more effective. Tools like the Masyanya email worm. Released in 2002, this piece of malicious software drew on techniques popularized by the earlier Melissa virus. Hackers named it
after the popular Russian animated character Masyanya and distributed it in the form of email attachments. The attachments appeared innocent at first glance, but if any victims clicked them, their machines would become infected and the virus would proliferate by sending a copy of itself to everyone on the victim's contact list. Together, these infected machines became botnets - vast networks of infected devices that cybercriminals can use to carry out the likes of DDoS attacks. And as the Russian hacking community evolved and expanded, new figures emerged to lead the way
forward. One of those leaders was Peter Levashov, also known under the moniker "Severa" - the self-proclaimed "Spam King" of the internet. And that nickname wasn't an exaggeration. Levashov's spam messages impacted countless people around the world - anyone online with an active email account in the early 2000s likely received at least one, if not hundreds of spam messages that could be traced back to this man, who owned some of the biggest and most powerful botnets on the planet. Through his various carding and spamming schemes, Severa rose to the very top
of the Russian cybercriminal empire, and he operated with impunity, even sharing public price lists and ads for his services online. Russian law enforcement must have seen these materials and could have taken action against Severa. But they didn't. Before we explain why, you're watching The Military Show - and if you haven't subscribed yet, now's the time. The reason why the FSB didn't simply put Levashov behind bars is that they realized how useful his talents could be, especially after he formed a hacktivist group known as "Civil Anti-Terror." Originally,
this movement was founded as a way to bring disparate groups of hackers together under a common banner, so that they could operate more easily and efficiently coordinate attacks against Chechnya. The likes of random DDoS attacks and repackaged viruses became less effective as time went by and cybersecurity improved, so Russian hackers needed to become more resourceful in order to deal serious damage to their adversaries. Under Severa's guidance, they mounted an all-out offensive against the Chechens. Then, they started shifting their focus towards other targets that
were also enemies of the Kremlin. Like Russian opposition parties, independent media sites, non-governmental organizations, and even foreign countries that were seen as critical of how Russia was ruled. For Severa, it didn't seem to matter if he was bombarding political parties or sending "get rich quick" spam messages to random people around the world - it all worked and profited him, one way or another, and the mechanisms involved were largely the same. For years, rumors swirled that Severa must be working in some sort of freelance or contractor capacity
for the Russian government, especially in 2007, when his vast botnets were used for a massive cyberattack on Estonia. Years later, politicians from the Nashi movement and the ruling United Russia party admitted to playing a part in this attack, and Severa, too, owned up to the fact that he'd been working with the party. And the evidence continued to pile up from there. Around the same time as the Estonia attack, a Moscow programmer named Anton Noskov decided to make a copy of Severa's Civil Anti-Terror website to preserve for future generations to analyze.
Even when the original site was eventually taken down, Noskov's copy remained. Then, in May 2007, he received a phone call from a man from Russia's National Anti-Terrorist Committee - an offshoot of the FSB - who said that his employers were very interested in collaborating with Severa and asked for his contact information. Noskov wasn't interested in helping, so instead decided to share his story with independent journalists, effectively revealing to the wider world that Russia's premier security agency was actively hiring malicious hackers. And Levashov was merely
the prototype. In the years that followed, many more stories emerged of criminal hacker groups and specific individuals being approached by the FSB - not to be punished for their crimes, but rewarded with secret government deals. While the specifics varied from case to case, many of these stories followed a familiar playbook. Criminal hackers would first gain a name for themselves via their illegal activities, like credit card theft, spam operations, building botnets, hacking major websites, orchestrating DDoS attacks, or distributing malware and viruses. This effectively
was their way of proving their capacities. Many then began to shift towards carrying out politically motivated attacks, whether they be attacks on Chechen websites, against NATO nations, against Ukraine, or other targets. This was their way of demonstrating that their ideologies lined up with those of the government. Once the FSB identified hackers who appeared to have exceptional skills and interests that matched their own, they would reach out to them, sometimes offering an informal or covert collaboration, but other times directly recruiting them into
the agency's increasingly expansive and powerful hacker army. It was a win-win for all involved. The hackers get the benefit of governmental protection and freedom from prosecution, allowing them to continue carrying out their illicit activities. They also enjoy all the prestige, money, and power that comes from working on behalf of the Kremlin. The state, meanwhile, gets to deploy some of the most experienced, expert operators in the cybercrime world to do its bidding, with all of their ready-made botnets, malware, and criminal infrastructure
for carrying out offensive operations and information warfare with their enemies, both domestic and international. And since so much of this is done in secret, the state also maintains a level of plausible deniability. The Kremlin also, ultimately, retains the power. If ever its hired cyber-mercenaries lose their utility, the FSB can easily take action against them, which can include prosecution, imprisonment, and public humiliation. Such was the case of Dmitry Dokuchaev, also known under the alias "Forb." Forb came from a small town and got into hacking early
on in life. He was an avid video game player and hacked into a local internet service provider to gain free internet access. He also had a habit of documenting his exploits, writing blog posts, articles, and even sitting down for interviews to share the details of his cybercrime career. In 2002, for example, he started working for a Russian hacking magazine while also running a carding operation. He regularly boasted about breaking his way into websites and soon moved to Moscow to live a luxurious life on the back of his hacking profits. One night, Forb and some friends
were trying to destroy surveillance cameras in the Russian capital when they were accosted by law enforcement officers. It transpired that one of those officers worked with the FSB, and once he started chatting with Forb, the seeds of a mutually beneficial relationship were sown. In the years that followed, Forb became an active collaborator of the agency, eventually progressing to the role of an employee with the FSB's Center for Informational Security, where he was tasked with monitoring, finding, and hiring other cybercriminals he felt had the skills
and mindset needed to support the state's cyber operations. He'd spend his time scouring hacker forums, reading posts of other users, looking for people who were both talented and patriotic before offering them collaborative deals with the Kremlin. He reportedly did this for over a decade, recruiting an unknown number of criminal hackers during that time. In 2016, however, Forb appeared to become more of a liability than an asset to the FSB. He was arrested, accused of transferring classified information to the United States, and charged with treason.
He maintained his innocence, claiming that he was simply being used as a scapegoat, which is entirely plausible, given Russia's track record, but it wasn't enough to save him from a six year prison sentence. It would be reasonable to think that Forb's story should serve as a warning to other hackers who were considering working with the government. In reality, however, it didn't seem to dissuade many of them from accepting FSB deals as and when they were offered. In the decade since Forb's arrest, there have been numerous recorded instances - and many
more surely that are off-the-record - involving hackers and hacking groups entering unofficial agreements with the Russian government, lending their skills towards operations like interfering in Western elections, hacking into Ukrainian websites during the war between the two nations, spreading digital propaganda, stealing sensitive information, and carrying out extortion attacks. There's the infamous Evil Corps hacking group, for example, headed up by a man named Maksim Yakubets, who is often described in Russian media as the "hacker who stole $100 million" and drives a
Lamborghini around the streets of Moscow without any risk of being arrested. Why? Because he happens to be married to the daughter of a former high-ranking FSB official who used his influence to not only protect Evil Corps from prosecution, but bring it into the agency's fold. Numerous reports allege that the FSB has actively tasked Evil Corps with conducting digital espionage and aggressive cyberattacks against NATO nations over the years. In exchange, the group has been allowed to get away with extensive money laundering operations, extortion,
ransomware, and large-scale theft. There's also the equally notorious hacktivist group: Killnet. Operating primarily via Telegram channels, Killnet formed in March 2022, during the opening stages of the war with Ukraine, and has gone on to carry out numerous DDoS and cyberattacks on critical infrastructure and government websites in countries that are perceived as allies of Ukraine, like Romania, Moldova, Norway, Latvia, the United States, and Germany. There hasn't been any clear, concrete proof linking this group - or its enigmatic leader, "Killmilk" - with the FSB,
though many researchers believe that even if Killnet isn't working directly with the Security Service, it clearly has some level of protection from the Kremlin, since their interests so closely align. This is the frightening truth of Russia's cyberwarfare strategy. It's not about recruiting talented technology experts via legal channels, headhunting the best of the best in the country's leading IT firms, or training white hat hackers at top tech universities. Instead, it's a seedy underground enterprise involving official government agencies mixing with shady
criminal groups, brokering deals in the dark that allow hackers to continue spreading viruses and scamming millions of people, so long as they do a bit of work for the Kremlin on the side. Like many other aspects of the Kremlin's operations, it's an ugly and heinous way of doing business, but it's exactly what we've come to expect of the Putin regime. But that regime could, at last, be approaching its end. You can learn more about that in this video, which details how even Putin's closest allies have started to turn on him and are now urging their leader to end the war, as soon as possible. Alternatively, check out this video to see how Ukraine just served Russia a long-overdue dish of revenge, eight years
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