This Hacker Party Is Ground Zero for Russia's Cyber spies

[UCmeNdc]

Kremlin intelligence officers, top researchers, indicted hackers, and Moscow’s answer to ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’—they all gather at Russia’s biggest cybersecurity confab.

As Air Force One touched down in Brussels last year for Donald Trump’s disastrous first meeting with America’s NATO allies, one of the Russian military hackers who helped put Trump in office was at a conference center in Moscow, surrounded by Russia’s top hacking talent, and likely on the prowl for new recruits.

The event, called “Positive Hacks Days,” is an annual computer security conference run by the respected Moscow-based firm Positive Technologies. Like other hacker cons it’s a mix of deep technical presentations and late-night parties, with some contests, workshops, and drinking games thrown in.

In 2017, the event’s sixth year, the theme of the two-day gathering was "The Enemy Inside.” The conference featured a competition called “The Standoff” that saw dozens of hackers working in teams to cripple a simulated metropolitan city, attacking its telecom infrastructure, rail lines and electrical grid.

For some attendees, that exercise—an echo of the coordinated cyber attacks on Kiev five months before—must have felt like just another day at the office.

A review of online registration records for Positive Hack Days reveals the conference as one of the few venues where indicted members of Russia’s “Fancy Bear” hacking team have left public traces of their existence outside the halls of Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate, the GRU.

“Either they went there to recruit, or they went there to learn,” said computer security expert and author Bruce Schneier. “My guess is it’s a combination of both.”


https://www.thedailybeast.com/this-hacker-party-is-ground-zero-for-russias-cyberspies-3?via=ios

[empedocles]

1. 'War' by any other name

RW haters, if and when they get some awareness of some of these things, will call it a 'phony war' - history repeats.