I got goosebumps reading the second one, because it's so close to what could actually happen. I live in a small eastern European country in a frozen conflict with Russia. Both cell carriers in my country have a way to send messages to its users en masse, which is at the moment used to spam people with ads and political messages (given that the commissioner pays enough per message).
Russian hackers hijacking both cell companies to send a string of messages to citizens seems like a very plausible scenario. Our software companies are notorious for their terrible security measures (which are often nonexistent). Just a few months ago, a few major hosting companies were hacked by possibly Ukranian or Russian actors to have every site hosted on them be replaced with a single image of our past megalomaniacal president holing our flag with subtitles saying "I'll be back". It could have just been a test run to see how we'd handle it or respond to it. I had access to one of the websites and skimmed through its directories. The directory which contained static content for serving had multiple child directories following a naming pattern: `name`, `name_`, `name__` ... I think the virus would recursively add an underscore to the directory it was creating if a directory with the same name already existed. Seems like the attacks happened multiple times and were automated, so it probably didn't require great effort from the attacker. Maybe the multiple names were due to different ways of attacking and it's saddening to see that 3+ different ways to hack our hosting services worked.
Russia has been slowly creeping the border towards our capital city. If Russia wanted, it could easily just annex the entire country and nobody outside would give a damn. We'd just have to comply because we're in a total mess. EU would wag their fingers and "condemn" what Russia did and that would be the end of it. I think Russia has bigger plans. Just taking us over has less value compared to the alternative: to test out its cyber-attacking power on a small challenge such as our country before moving onto bigger targets, such as Ukraine.
Where do you suggest I move? Finland and Canada are looking great, their immigration policies seem lax :-)
Russian hackers hijacking both cell companies to send a string of messages to citizens seems like a very plausible scenario. Our software companies are notorious for their terrible security measures (which are often nonexistent). Just a few months ago, a few major hosting companies were hacked by possibly Ukranian or Russian actors to have every site hosted on them be replaced with a single image of our past megalomaniacal president holing our flag with subtitles saying "I'll be back". It could have just been a test run to see how we'd handle it or respond to it. I had access to one of the websites and skimmed through its directories. The directory which contained static content for serving had multiple child directories following a naming pattern: `name`, `name_`, `name__` ... I think the virus would recursively add an underscore to the directory it was creating if a directory with the same name already existed. Seems like the attacks happened multiple times and were automated, so it probably didn't require great effort from the attacker. Maybe the multiple names were due to different ways of attacking and it's saddening to see that 3+ different ways to hack our hosting services worked.
Russia has been slowly creeping the border towards our capital city. If Russia wanted, it could easily just annex the entire country and nobody outside would give a damn. We'd just have to comply because we're in a total mess. EU would wag their fingers and "condemn" what Russia did and that would be the end of it. I think Russia has bigger plans. Just taking us over has less value compared to the alternative: to test out its cyber-attacking power on a small challenge such as our country before moving onto bigger targets, such as Ukraine.
Where do you suggest I move? Finland and Canada are looking great, their immigration policies seem lax :-)