It's hard to take this seriously when the author tries to make big points about geopolitics and then claims that Georgia or Ukraine have "favorable relations" with the Kremlin (those countries are literally at war with Russia). Not to mention them not knowing basic facts like Moldova and Romania being in fact 2 separate independent countries.
Having spent considerable time in both Georgia and Ukraine, I can tell you that the news that gets to western media misses out all the nuances of reality. In both countries there are substantial groups of people who want to ally with Russia. The "Russia is invading our country" narrative is only held by some.
I don't think it's missed at all. I think it's pretty well known by most people that the Russians that were moved into Ukraine and Georgia while under the USSR blanket are still loyal to Russia. That's exactly why they were moved there in the first place. The tartars were moved out (of Ukraine) in order to ensure loyalty to the USSR.
He also cites Romania as having a particularly great relationship with Russia, which is neither true (they're in NATO and the EU and mostly West focused) nor relevant (the Romanian keyboard layout wasn't even listed, only the Moldovan variety).
We can choose to assume that he omitted the nuance you're adding (eg for brevity), or that he has no clue. I'd say most evidence points to the latter. Which is sad because I often enjoy his blog a lot.
Yes it does, but it looks to me like Krebs read "Romanian" in the list of keyboard layouts, skimmed over the "(Moldova)" part and assumed that that means Romania and Russia are BFFs.
Which is a shame, but can we really expect everyone to be up on all the various nuances of geopolitics? It's an unfortunate error, but I think an understandable one, and it doesn't undercut the point of the article.
> The "Russia is invading our country" narrative is only held by some.
Mainly those that believe in concepts such as 'borders' and 'sovereignty'
You might personally feel that those residents welcomed foreign troops with open arms, but it's not a narrative that Russian forces crossed Ukraine's border to annex territory that didn't belong to it.
One nuance of reality in the Western world is that the 3 latter agencies have a tendancy to perpetrate crimes & blame the Russians or Sadaam or Ghadafi or the Syrians or White Supremacy or the fall guy du jour.
The "weird trick" or "see something say something" or "kiss the Barney Stone" or "rub Buddha's Belly" or some other simple token action is an effective way to create engagement with a narrative.
Part of the art of "hacking" is social engineering after all.
> Not to mention them not knowing basic facts like Moldova and Romania being in fact 2 separate independent countries.
Maybe this is from a language barrier/confusion? I know that the modern state of Romania comes from a union of the Wallachian/Transylvanian/Moldavian principalities, and modern Moldova originates from part of the historical Moldavian principality which the USSR forced independent Romania to secede (?).
I think the Moldavian would refer to themselves as "Romanians" as a group of people, unless emphasizing the particular government/nationality? I know this is probably a controversial topic, I really don't know much about the modern geopolitical status there, just speculating why the article may conflate Romanian and Moldova.
Oh, you're totally giving the author too much credit to assume they know the history of Romania.
I bet it just stems from a lack of reading comprehension. Moldova has 2 keyboard layouts (Romanian and Russian) according to the screenshot posted in the article, so I presume they just read "Romanian" which vaguely sounded like a country name they sometime read about, and chucked it into the list.
You are absolutely right. The point here is that it's difficult to take the author's geopolitical claims seriously, when he is easily confused by Romania/Moldova duality.
That immediately jumped out at me as well as a basic geopolitical error.
Nonetheless:
- The list of countries is taken from the malware. It is not speculation.
- The fact that a number of major malware strains do not install on machines with Russian and various other Eastern European localisation settings is an objective fact as anyone in the malware field can tell you.
These organisations exist to make money and "the heat" is a detriment to making money. These groups are able to operate with impunity because they take such drastic steps to not anger the local authorities(legitimate and illegitimate). As other commentators have pointed out, these list of countries are likely at the behest of those people, who have various reasons for choosing them. If interested, you can google about a fellow named Paunch if you want to understand the consequences of shitting where you eat as a Russian "cybercriminal".
From a purely money-making perspective, it's a lot more effective to fly under the radar and infect companies far away from them. The ROI simply isn't there for these groups to infect machines closer to home.
That is, of course, until you do something like this, which was clearly and obviously a massive fuck up.
> The fact that a number of major malware strains do not install on machines with Russian and various other Eastern European localisation settings
TBH I'd never think of the countries on that list as Eastern European. With the possible exception of Moldova because it's originally a part of Romania.
That's unfortunate, because he has some good points. I don't think he set out to offend, and ignoring the message due to a factual error is short-sighted.
