It must be an unprecedented event not only for Ukraine, but for the entire world, too. The sites of president, Verkhovna Rada, Cabinet of Ministers, National Bank, Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA), Security Service (SSU) and even the Constitutional Court went offline in this country within just two days. In fact, the entire top-down structure of government has been hacked. Everything went offline!
The first question that arises is how could this have happened? The sites of the key state institutions are offline, while the institutions themselves are completely unable to deal with the problem. Should we consider them unable to defend themselves? Just think about it! The entire SSU can not protect its own site!
“The site was created, in fact, seven years ago,” we were told by the source in the SSU. “I suppose it has not been updated, let alone had its security system modernized since. The site endured with some difficulty close to 200 simultaneous visitors, but it started to have troubles whenever 2,000 of them accessed it at a time.” Our source in the SSU said that “the service has long been working on coping with the challenges of cyber terrorism and cyber crime, which is now globally recognized as the number-one threat.” According to the source, the institution has already established the Department of Counterintelligence Protection of State Interests in the Field of Information Security: “The department has been established recently. It has no chief officer as of yet, they continue to iron out the organizational issues. Much remains on paper only. Of course, the department can not work at full capacity under such conditions. We also wait for the parliament to pass the bill on protection of information. It provides, inter alia, for the protection of information resources.”
Our source assured us that the SSU had nothing to do with the smooth functioning and protection of the state institutions’ sites.
“If the site belongs to Cabinet of Ministers, then the cabinet’s systems administrator is responsible for its security and smooth functioning. We have repeatedly reminded the cabinet that they should change and improve security on the site, but they did not listen.”
President Yanukovych’s spokesperson Darka Chepak appealed through her blog at the Ukrainska Pravda to “the unknown hackers” to not retaliate against the president for ex.ua’s woes. (Many of The Day’s readers, probably, learned about the said web resource’s existence less than a week ago). She alleged that the attacks prevented the presidential administration from publishing certain nationally important information.
We would venture to predict that the esteemed spokesperson was wrong in her reasoning about the cause of the attack. It is carried out not only to support the file sharing site, as a lot of the attackers likely accessed ex.ua only infrequently. This attack has no particular organizer. Hundreds of Ukrainian citizens attacked government sites completely independently from each other as they sat at their monitors at home or at work. It is noteworthy that this attack was supported by users from America and Canada, home to hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians.
Russian journalist Pavel Sheremet in his blog on the Echo of Moscow site called this phenomenon “quasi-popular front” and “repeat of the Maidan on the Internet.”
“People are concerned not with the disappearance of another cart with free gifts, they are annoyed by the current Ukrainian government as such, and shutting down the torrent tracker was just an occasion to display this attitude,” Sheremet wrote. “I do not want to justify hacking in any way... But the sheer fact of self-organizing civic protest in Ukraine is very telling. There was the Orange protest in the Maidan Nezalezhnosti, then there were the tax protests and Afghanistan war and Chornobyl disaster veterans breaking fence around the parliament building. Now it is ‘the Maidan on the Internet.’ Ukraine sees mass protests every two months. This is what distinguishes Ukraine from Russia.”
According to the Russian journalist, the main difference between the two countries is that many Ukrainians do not want to put up with injustice and give up when officials are trying to subjugate everybody and everything.
Should these hacker attacks be called “a popular front”? Probably not. They have neither range, nor driving force to be seen as such. It is just a signal, not a front as of yet, but a very important signal all the same. We have just seen not only crashing of the sites, but also smashing of some people’s cocksureness that everything was permitted to them, that the nation would put up with any measures. Now it turned out that it would not. The people can not only express their hatred in social networks, but also do something.
Ellina SHNURKO-TABAKOVA, Chairman of the Association of Information Technology Enterprises in Ukraine (AITEU):
“The community, represented on the Internet by professionals, has decided to display its attitude to the events in its particular way. The attack on the sites of state institutions has nothing to do with IT-specialists, protection of the wronged users’ rights or with copyright infringements. It is just that excessive action by the government has caused similarly excessive reaction by those who considered themselves wronged. Although, of course, one should distinguish between breaches of the law and totally legal behavior.
“For example, did the persons who stored their own documents on ex.ua violate the copyright law? The law enforcement agencies’ unwillingness to clarify it and take reasonable, in society’s opinion, measures is causing a wave of blanket negative attitude. The government can not stop the people who have joined this particular protest by using the usual expedient of banning street protests.
“I do not think that hacking attacks on the sites of the MIA, SSU, and president of Ukraine were carried out in order to put ex.ua back online. A reasonable government must understand what measures should be taken, as a person who accidentally stepped on someone’s foot should not serve 10 years in prison. In Ukraine, we are increasingly seeing just such situations.
“We all must be aware that the law may not be violated by just storing the information. The violations may occur in connection with distribution or use of the content to which that particular user has no rights. The question as to whether ex.ua had violated the copyright law is very ambiguous. The technological world is becoming ever more complex, and the world now sees what stricter copyright laws may lead to.
“Obviously, the law does not keep pace with technological development. This process is characteristic not only for Ukraine. For example, the Wikipedia strike indicates that some legislators just do not understand the strategy of global development for the next 50 years. They are still trying to do what they did during the typewriter era.
“I think that Ukraine’s greatest problem is that owners of video and audio products copyrights refrain from creating the market, they can not propose adequate supply for those consumers who are ready to buy legal copies of movies and music. They do not enter into any agreements with those who could distribute these products, and thus the Ukrainian market is in fact isolated. Actually, isolation is caused by lack of alternatives to copyright infringement far more than by the breaches of the law themselves, as there are people who are quite willing to pay money for conveniently distributed products which would be available via audio and video libraries on the Internet. But creating such alternatives requires certain decisions, certain vision of a way to make agreements with the copyright holders. Unfortunately, this mechanism does not work in Ukraine and I do not see a positive outlook for it as of now.
“In any case, a commercial entity that needs market for its products should create this market. But no market was created anywhere in the world through mechanisms of repression.”
By Oleksandr KUPRIIENKO, The Day
