From: Voice of Russia

According to a recent order of Russia’s President, a new structure will be formed within Russia’s Federal Security Service – a structure for fighting against cyber attacks.

Unfortunately, at present, cyber attacks happen not only in science fiction books. They have already become a reality. For example, recently, the Kaspersky Laboratory (Russia’s best known laboratory that develops computer antivirus programs) discovered a virus called “Red October”, which had attacked computer networks of governments and military scientific centers in many countries. It is not yet known who launched this “Red October” virus, but the scale of this cyber attack gives grounds to suppose that most likely, it was not amateurs, but a well-developed spying organization.

“In such a situation, it is only logical that Russia’s President has ordered to create a structure for fighting against cyber attacks,” Dmitry Troshin from the Institute of Problems of Economic Security and Strategic Planning says.

“The current state of development of computer technologies allows to create very complicated virus programs, and Russia needs a well-developed technical base to face this challenge,” Mr. Troshin says. “Unfortunately, today, we can speak about a threat of cyber terrorism and even a cyber war.”

Russia already has several structures for fighting against cyber attacks, both within the Federal Security Service and the Foreign Ministry. Sometimes, they even act together.

“However, I believe that President Putin’s decision to create one united government structure for fighting against cyber attacks was absolutely right,” the Director for Business Development of the “Grotesk” company Alexander Vlasov says.

“This decision was right because the number of cyber attacks on computer resources of various Russian government structures in constantly growing. At present, security of government structures includes, first of all, security of computer database and computer resources.”

The Director of the Center of Public and Political Studies Vladimir Evseev believes that the new structure will mainly have to resist cyber attacks that may be aimed at committing real terrorist acts.

“Cyber terrorism is a new kind of terrorism that can lead to real human victims,” Mr. Evseev says. “At present, there is a large threat that Russia may suffer from cyber terrorist attacks of Islamist or other terrorist organizations, and we should resist this threat.”

Experts say that the possibility of cyber conflict is very likely to increase in the nearest future. Russia needs to be well “armed” to resist this challenge.