Viron entinen presidentti Ilves on vetänyt taas sanansäilänsä esiin ja nyt hän on ottanut kohteekseen Orbanin Unkarin - ja ihan aiheesta! Vaikka Unkarilla ei tosiaan olekaan rannikkoa, jonne voisi parkkeerata LNG-terminaalia jne, niin pitää myös muistaa että ihan yhtä hyvin he olisivat voineet rakentaa vaikkapa ydinvoimaloita mutta ovat ihan itse päätyneet lussuttamaan energiaansa venäjän kaasunisästä.
Lisäksi on Suomenkin kannalta hyvä että näitä Unkarin ja Orbanin epämääräisiä toimia kritisoidaan valtionpäämiesten taholta - vaikkakin tässä tapauksessa entisen sellaisen, mutta kyllä entisilläkin huippupoliitikoilla on kovin kuuluva ääni. Suomen kannalta tämä on hyvä siksi että jos meinaavat Unkarissa yhtään heittäytyä Suomen ja Ruotsin NATO-jäsenyyden ratifioinnin osalta poikkiteloin, niin voidaan helposti lyödä pöytään aiempaa tuoretta syntilistaa ja koska Unkarilla ei ole edes mitenkään strategisesti merkittävä sijainti tai muuta korvaamatonta tarjottavaa niin niin '
do the math'...
Tämä erittäin laadukas artikkeli laitettiin tänne eilen, mutta lainaan siitä pari pätkää jotka kertovat miten vakavia vaikutuksia ryssän asiamiehillä voi olla laajempaan turvallisuuteen:
LÄHDE
The large-scale Russian TeamSpy attack was discovered not by the counterintelligence of Western countries, but by experts at the cyber defence center of the Hungarian National Security Authority (NBF), according to a cyber security expert familiar with the incident. The Hungarian center, called the Cyber Defence Management Authority (CMDA), set up in 2011, gathered expertise and cyber defence capabilities over ministries and state agencies, and were so successful that one of their Hungarian experts was
elected to head NATO’s cyber defence task force.
According to a cyber security expert familiar with the incident, the Hungarians responded to the TeamSpy attack with an aggressive counterattack. They hacked into the Russian attack infrastructure, identified Russian hackers operating from Russian and Ukrainian Internet cafes, among others, and obtained the target list of TeamSpy attacks. In a joint operation with NATO partners, by accessing the victims’ computers around the world, they simultaneously shut down infected devices, cutting off Russian hackers from a wealth of information. Such an operation requires serious organisation and expertise, which, according to several Direkt36 sources familiar with the case and involved in cybersecurity, shows how advanced Hungarian cyber defence was at the time.
It was in the early 2010s that Russian intelligence services – mainly the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and the Russian military intelligence (GRU) – really started to get into hacking. “For Russia, cyber warfare is part of a permanent information warfare. This warfare is based on the perception that the Western world wants to undermine Russia’s position of power and is ultimately engaged in a comprehensive and continuous effort to subjugate the country,” AH’s (AH = Constitution Protection Office) former senior national security officer Péter Buda told Direkt36.
Since the Russians see NATO simply as a military tool of the United States, Buda said, their cyber espionage “is mainly aimed at detecting information and conflicts of interest that could disrupt the unity of the NATO alliance, in addition to the continuous monitoring of capabilities and intentions”. The cyber espionage method, also used by the Russians, called Advanced Persistent Threat (APT), does not aim at immediate, visible damage, like a simple hacker attack, but at a persistent presence within the targeted IT system.
While Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was already advertising his pivot towards Russia and China, Russian hackers of the GRU and FSB – hacking groups known as APT28 and APT29 – treated Hungary as an enemy and attacked it just as they did other EU and NATO member states. An official of the Orbán government at the time, said that in 2012-2014, in addition to the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Interior and even the Ministry of Defence were compromised by hackers. Based on their digital footprint and intelligence sharing with NATO/EU partners, they were also very likely Russians.
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Former Cyber Defence Management Authority (CDMA) head Ferenc Frész said in a 2015 presentation that much of their work was about addressing these vulnerabilities. But by then the CDMA had virtually ceased to exist. In his presentation, Frész claimed that Hungarian cyber defence had been dismantled in a way that had completely eliminated Hungary’s defence capabilities, and that “it was all done under Russian economic pressure”. He did not elaborate on what basis he made this claim, and when contacted by Direkt36 he declined to comment on his statement at the time.
The spectacular pro-Russian turn in Hungarian politics came in 2014, after Orbán and Putin announced their agreement on the Paks2 nuclear power plant expansion. Then Péter Szijjártó, who already had extensive Russian connections, took over the leadership of the MFA (MFA = Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade). In November 2014, the head of the National Security Authority was fired, the institution was brought under the Ministry of Interior, and a few months later the staff of the Cyber Defence Management Authority was laid off as part of a “reorganisation”.
According to a cybersecurity expert familiar with the case, the Orbán government began to see Hungarian cyber defence as a linchpin of the Hungarian-Russian rapprochement, and the agreement on the Paks nuclear expansion, among other things, brought a negative turn. Another cybersecurity expert added that CDMA’s staff have also isolated themselves by revealing to various ministries, in an unvarnished style and “without much diplomacy”, what critical vulnerabilities they had found in government networks.
Under the third Orbán government, cyber defence tasks were taken over by agencies under the Ministry of Interior, primarily the Special Service for National Security (SSNS). However, after the abolition of the Cyber Defence Management Authority, in fact, all the intelligence and state agencies started to do a little bit of cyber defence. According to a former official of the Orbán government, the consequence of this include that the various agencies regularly point fingers at each other or wait for each other, operate in isolation from each other and sometimes there is even outright rivalry between them.
The next big wave of Russian attacks instantly showed the weaknesses of the new set-up.
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"Hyvien suhteiden ylläpitämiseksi" on siis ajettu alas oman maan selvästi toimiva cyber-puolustus. Se on nimellisesti olemassa, mutta hajautettu usean eri organisaation alle. Voisi sanoa "hajota ja hallitse", tosin tässä yhteydessä hallitsija on ryssä ja heidän tiedustelupalvelunsa. Toki kun tilanne on tämä, sen varmasti tiedostavat myös muiden maiden tiedusteluviranomaiset, joten yhteydet Unkariin pyritään minimoimaan jottei sieltä olisi kanavia mitä pitkin tunkeutua syvemmälle. Artikkelissa kirjoitetaan että osa Yhdysvaltain vaaleihin puuttuneista hyökkäyksistä tuli Unkarin verkosta, joten selvästi työtä riittää.
Orbanilla ei varmasti ole mitään halua puuttua tähän. Aikaisemmin joku kirjoitti siitä, miten Unkarilla ei ole pääsyä merelle ja siten kaasun laivaaminen ei ole mahdollista. On siis sidottu väistämättä ryssän kaasuun, mikä ohjaa kaikkea tekemistä. Totta sinänsä, mutta EU:n sisällä on sovittu kaasun siirroista eri maiden varantojen välillä. Ainakin teoriassa tämän pitäisi onnistua, en ole varma kuinka yleistä se on käytännössä. Muistaakseni tästä sovittiin viimeistään 2014 tapahtuneen Krimin valtaamisen jälkeen, ellei jo aikaisemmin.