"Five Russians went out drinking..."

I very much enjoyed this very obviously planted story of ASD punking the Russian cybercrims who stole my Medibank data back in August 2022. The government (in fact, all of the 5 Eyes governments) dropped the story for a bunch of reasons, including image management and deterrence.

I doubt it will have a deterrent effect. You’d need more kinetic solutions for that to truly happen. But it is good narrative management to tell these tales occasionally.

From The SmAge:

The Australian Signals Directorate, which is the nation’s digital spying agency, already knew who had stolen the Medibank data. His name is Aleksandr Ermakov, a Moscow-based hacker who has since been arrested by Russian authorities for other crimes using a ransomware model, where sensitive data is stolen and the victims are forced into paying to get it deleted or returned.

But the bigger task for the directorate was to identify where Ermakov was keeping it.

…

For Ermakov, that was an obscure company called ZServers in Barnaul, a city of 630,000 that is closer to Mongolia than Moscow.

Be cooler if they’d been able to send an SAS team in, but you can’t have everything, I suppose. Perhaps I should write that one up as an ebook.