The Russian Ministry of Defence, together with the Federal Security Service, are formulating a range of measures aimed at fighting the ever growing threat of NetTraveler, a Trojan which has been and is being used for attacks on the country's leading weapons and combat equipment manufacturers.
Details of the planned measures are not disclosed.
In recent months, the number of cyber-attacks using NetTraveler on Russian military entities has significantly increased, which, according to the country's Ministry of Defence, may pose a threat to the state national security.
The targets of attack are currently not disclosed, however, according to some sources close to the Defence Ministry, hackers have attempted to conduct a series of cyber-attacks on some of Russian largest military enterprises, such as Uralvagonzavod, Russia's largest tank producer, Russian Helicopters, the country's helicopter monopoly, as well as some of Russia's other leading military design bureaus and enterprises.
The increase in attacks is happening now, which has been seen by some as related to the Farnborough Air Show currently being held in the UK, which has always been attended by the representatives of Russia's leading producers of military helicopters and aircrafts.
Despite the position of some Western analysts, that the attacks which use NetTraveler were conducted by a large international group of hackers, mostly from China, some top officials in the Russian Federal Security Service are reported to believe that they were organised and carried out by hacker groups affiliated with Ukrainian and Western special services.
A spokesman of the Russian Federal Security Service, who asked not to mention his name, told SC's St Petersburg correspondent that Western countries are unhappy with the ever growing military potential of Russia, designing different measures to disrupt the country's leading military enterprises and break their computer systems.
Sergey Stepanichev, a senior manager of NPO Energia, the Russian defence enterprise, is reported as saying that due to the ever growing number of cyber-attacks faced, many Russian military enteprises have decided to suspend previously announced computerisation of their operations, amid fears of data leakage, as the majority of their computer systems still operate using Western IT technologies and web-servers.
