Ah yes. The benefit of a monoculture.
Guessing games as to source. Have they not heard of the double bluff?
Security watchers have discovered a malware-based cyber-espionage campaign targeting diplomats, governments and scientific research institutions worldwide. Operation Red October has targeted Eastern Europe, former Soviet republics, and countries in Central Asia for the past five years, according to Kaspersky Lab. The attack …
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Dumkov and Dumkovski seem to be a variation on the same name thus might be a made-up one. Ustyugov would (Устюгов, there is a town Великий Устюг) -- again sounds artificial. Igor Shaven is the most unusual but plausible.
However, all these people if real, might be unaware of this "Red October".
It doesn't say they were spying on NATO, it says NATO was one of the customers of the Acid Cryptofiler product, a product that the malware could penetrate.
I have zero doubt that the USA spies on the EU and EU nations. I have zero doubt that major EU nations spy on the USA and on each other.
The artifacts of Russian in the code, those could have been inserted intentionally.
And the infecting country could well have infected some of its own machines, knowing that there would be no harm in doing so.
You would probably have to look at what commands were sent, what data was sent back, from multiple infected machines from multiple countries, to try to figure out which country was behind this.
So this is where all those snoopy privacy destroying logs that ISPs are supposed to keep on us all are supposed to come in.
So, do they have logs from the past few years that they can go back and look at? Or do our rulers exempt themselves from surveillance?
Nah 5 years running without detection they are definitely 1 up, I am sure they expected it to be discovered well before now.
NATO couldn't find its bottom without a ton of bureaucratic red tape, seriously doubt they could pull off something this clever, unless of course the yanks or Israelis gave them access to the guys who came up with Stuxnet and the other clones.