or diplomatic negotiations where people just talk past each other delivering pre-written speeches repeatedly like someone is going to hear something new the 3rd time you read the speech.
Its not one person, these are groups of people who likely have a single strength in a particular area. the guy who is good at hacking, is the guy sending phsining emails isnt the guy setting up the bank accounts.
My novice POV is that you would expect russians to have a higher ratio of hackers to script kiddies as opposed to a country like Ghana who scams just as many that is mostly just script kiddies trading techniques on underground markets.
From what I've seen on OSINT Twitter, I think what you're missing is that Russia is not actually all that good at cyberwarfare in terms of hacking high security systems, or even securing their own systems. There was a story today about a high ranking general who was killed and it was picked up by the OSINT community due to Russians using unencrypted phones to communicate on the battlefield. Extremely rookie mistake. Russia's cyberwarfare strengths seem to end with simple DDoS attacks and propaganda bot nets on social networks.
At the same time, there's a difference between cyberwarefare strengths and operational security being practiced (or not) by the soldiers in the field. It only takes one person to break protcol and pull out an unsecure device. Or it could be done on purpose as a bit of plausible deniability of sabatoge.
There's a bunch of reasons I can think of than just Russia is weak about secure comms.
It's an insecure protocol rather than a device. If they'd used an encrypted VOIP app it would literally be secure, but they banned those out of paranoia and weren't able to provide their own replacements.
I think the actual intercept was real intelligence tapping the cell phone network and OSINT accounts just repeated it, but not sure.
Since Google doesn't really own much infrastructure outside of the US, I don't think Google can do much, and maybe doesn't even have that much insight on what is going through the pipes elsewhere.
There is a lot more things happening that just phishing attacks though, from both sides. While Russia is attacking Ukrainian IT-infrastructure, Russian IT-infrastructure is getting hit by every other country at the moment.
> Since Google doesn't really own much infrastructure outside of the US
What is that claim based on? I think they have alot of presence here in Europe. I doubt it would be economically to transfer too much data over the atlantic. Think of every Youtube video that is being watched. However, for services requiring central storage longer like e.g. email, I have no idea. I am not sure whether mailboxes have a home region.
Disclaimer: No insider knowledge here. Just what Iremember from tracouting years ago and trying to apply some common sense.
Phishing campaigns? I'd assume those happen year round, war or not.
Am I wrong here? Missing something?