Russian Security Services are looking for new cyber weapons
Hacker group Digital Revolution has published documents showing a contract request of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) to develop the so-called "Fronton" program, which allows to carry out cyberattacks using infected Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
Digital Revolution calls itself the "face of the digital revolution." In 2018-2019, the group released documents obtained as a result of the hacking of two alleged FSB contractors. It was reported that the Russian secret service requested that contractors provide ability to deanonymize Russian Tor browser users and monitor emails.
Hackers have published an archive of 12 technical documents, diagrams and fragments of code created in 2017-2018. According to the leak, the customer of the cyberweapons was the military unit No. 64829 - the Information Security Center of the FSB. In total, according to the hackers, there are three versions of the program - "Fronton," "Fronton-3D" and "Fronton-18." They allow to infect any "smart" devices, join them into the network and then attack the servers of the Internet Service providers and disrupt Internet services of entire countries.
The FSB contractors, according to the documents, proposed that the botnet should consist of 95% IP cameras and digital video recorders. "If they transmit video, they have a large enough communication channel to effectively perform DDoS (Denial of Service Attack)," the materials say.
Documents released by the hackers show that an attack of several hundred thousand infected devices could bring down social networks and freeze file-sharing for hours. An attack on a national DNS server can make the Internet inaccessible within hours in a small country.
Infected IoT devices attacked about 70 large Internet services in the United States in October 2016. Then Twitter, Netflix, Spotify, Paypal and Amazon were inaccessible for several hours.