…and, of course, Facebook management
FBI invites everyone to join on April 25 at the RSAC 2023 panel “Stronger Together: The US—Ukrainian Cyber Partnership”, moderated by Bryan Vorndran, Assistant Director of FBI Cyber, to learn more about how the U.S. and Ukraine face cyber threats together. Just on time!
Here is one of the problems that will be worth discussing by the panelists to see what resources (people, time and, of course, money) the cyber defenders of Ukraine spend on.
It was already happening to our Ukrainian Diaspora in Washington DC group: strange people with numbers as parts of their names and with no connections to the Washington DC area Ukrainian community or to the Greater Washington DC at all somehow managed to become members of the group for extended period of time were spamming the group with clearly stupid entries.
Ukrainian Diaspora in Washington DC group’s admins had to spend their time on deleting unwanted posts. It’s clear that the only reason of such spamming was to keep group’s admins busy. Thanks to admins’ efforts, the group page was not turned into a garbage field. The group was protected.
Failing to break through our defenses in one group, the hackers shifted their focus to another group. Now they are subjecting the Українська Світова Інформаційна Мережа (Ukrainian Worldwide Information Network) group to the same attacks (see screenshots). The goal of cybercriminals is the same — to take away admins’ time and to keep them busy with cleaning up that spam trash.
The problem here is that this cybercrime isn’t the antics of teenage bullies or adult jerks having fun because they have nothing else to do.
We know for sure that this is being done by highly qualified professional hackers, to whom the President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko has set the task of “jamming the active diaspora”. It has been four years since Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been the president of Ukraine, who, following his hated predecessor, encourages hacker attacks on diaspora internet resources in the US.
We would like to take this opportunity to remind cybercriminals that our resources are American legal entities in the full sense of this legal term. This means that we are protected by the US Constitution and laws.
At the same time, we publicly draw the attention of the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, Department of State to terrorizing us in social networks through hacker attacks, destruction of profiles and thematic pages. Please, contact us for more information.
Of course, we draw Facebook‘s management (with Mark Zuckerberg on top) attention to the described professional hackers intervention in the functioning of your resource. Hackers rule your field as if it were their own. And we are certainly not the only ones who suffer from such terror.
This situation is just an example. We can show you more sabotages that are done against Facebook users by professional cyber criminals.
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There is another issue that can be a subject of the US—Ukrainian Cyber Partnership. It’s known as Havana Syndrome. This issue popped up in the US diplomatic circles and, as far as we know, wasn’t completely investigated and resolved.
Since we have learned about this issue causing many American diplomats, we realized what is going on and were willing to share our knowledge and experiences with those responsible for solving this problem. We spent months on trying to reach out to Department of State and FBI to get in direct contact with people working on this.
At the end of year 2021, we managed to get in contact with Pamela Spratlen, a retired diplomat and former task force coordinator on Havana Syndrome cases at State Department. She advised us to contact Jonathan Moore, the current State Dept task force coordinator on Havana Syndrome cases. He ignored two letters of ours. With FBI, it’s even more complicated. All that can be done is to contact them via their hot line. You leave them a message but, of course, nobody gets back in touch.
Why are we so eager to reach out to US authorities and how can we help investigators in Havana Syndrome cases?
We know about this technology for decades (it used to be a dream of the Soviet psychological warfare). About thirty years ago, we had conversations with people claiming themselves victims of “a high frequency irradiation” causing different type of psychological and physical damages to humans. One of victims, with physics or engineering background, agreed to put his story and thoughts on paper. We have this document and can share it with those investigating Havana Syndrome cases. We know people who recently became victims of the discussed technology having the entire bouquet of Havana Syndrome.
We don’t have information about how this technology is being managed and handled in post-Soviet Russia. But we know that in post-Soviet Ukraine this technology is being used by the government and by private individuals as well, and where stations can be located.
In both countries, this technology is used to impact on their own citizens. No doubt that Russia uses this technology to impact citizens of other countries.
Originally developed to be used in close contact with potential victims, currently, this technology became a part of cyber warfare.