Hackers Expose Russian FSB Cyberattack Projects

by Bruce Schneier on July 22, 2019

More nation-state activity in cyberspace, this time from Russia:

Per the different reports in Russian media, the files indicate that SyTech had worked since 2009 on a multitude of projects since 2009 for FSB unit 71330 and for fellow contractor Quantum. Projects include:

Nautilus — a project for collecting data about social media users (such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn).
Nautilus-S — a project for deanonymizing Tor traffic with the help of rogue Tor servers.

Reward — a project to covertly penetrate P2P networks, like the one used for torrents.

Mentor — a project to monitor and search email communications on the servers of Russian companies.

Hope — a project to investigate the topology of the Russian internet and how it connects to other countries’ network.

Tax-3 — a project for the creation of a closed intranet to store the information of highly-sensitive state figures, judges, and local administration officials, separate from the rest of the state’s IT networks.

BBC Russia, who received the full trove of documents, claims there were other older projects for researching other network protocols such as Jabber (instant messaging), ED2K (eDonkey), and OpenFT (enterprise file transfer).

Other files posted on the Digital Revolution Twitter account claimed that the FSB was also tracking students and pensioners.