Did you purposefully ignore the line right after the one you quoted?
"The agency is affiliated with Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, and it supports sectors such as the military, civil aviation, agriculture, and maritime."
There are a huge number of valid strategic-level targets that are dual-use. Oil refineries, lubricants and ball bearings factories, etc.
Should the US and China get into a shooting war, you can absolutely expect them to be shooting down "weather satellites" pointing at each other's territory.
Only one of those sectors would justify the act. This is a case of not caring about collateral damage. Most of us will not be in a position to say whether or not the collateral damage was acceptable in order to attain the goal. But we can't pretend that the collateral damage was nonexistent.
Duh. Attacking an oil refinery or lubricants factory would also have "collateral damage" in terms of impacting civil society. So does attacks on port infrastructure. There are very few "strategic" targets that don't.
I feel much better about this kind of "collateral damage" than Russia blowing up Ukrainian grain silos, apartment buildings, and hydroelectric dams.
It may hurt economically by affecting things like aviation, but is unlikely to directly cause any loss of life. Humans aren't very sensitive to indirect loss of life that only shows up in statistics. It's similar to blowing up Russian oil refineries and gas infrastructure, in that it will impact civilians, but unlike such attacks it won't directly kill civilians. If this already concerns you, you should be very concerned about the economical sanctions imposed on Russia over this war, which have a much greater impact.
It's fine to have opinions over how wars should be fought and where to draw lines, but sadly implementing those opinions and having them survive contact with the reality of war is only realistic if all parties agree on the battlefield. We pretty much just have the Geneva Conventions for this, which Russia has been ignoring[1] anyways by attacking targets like grain silos.
I wonder how much of the data was _actually_ relevant to the Russian military - things like climate, natural disasters, weather data, etc. don't seem very helpful - the only thing that might help would be satellite images over time to see any new developments, etc. in Ukraine.
Not that the hackers would have had time to pick through data to delete only the stuff that might be useful to military though.
You see terrorist groups like ISIS going through countries blowing up monuments and historical sites to wipe out history, culture, and the hard work of it's citizens, and I feel this is part of the same. It's just unfortunate all around.
(I'm not conflating the Ukrainian military groups as terrorists for anybody ready to jump the gun and chastise me, it's just an observation, and it's disappointing I have to clarify this.)
2PB is a lot, but it's not a crazy huge amount. It's only ~100 LTO tapes isn't it? Or a shelf or 2 of hard drives, perhaps backed up to one of their other sites?
I'd also heard it said that the Chinese clouds were really busy in the days around the invasion, suggesting the Russians were backing up out of country to them.
That's been ongoing ever since 2014. The famous Maersk hack, the most costly cyberattack in history was a Russian cyberattack that was intended to target Ukrainian banks and businesses.
They mostly weaponized themselves, in a sense. Before the 2022 invasion (yes, even after 2014), the entire post-Soviet cybercriminal space, including the Baltics, was tightly connected (not just ransomware which is a recent thing but also carders, DDoS-for-hire, scammers, etc) and everyone has been outsourcing parts of their "business" to everyone else. What media used to call Russian ransomware gangs were in most cases loose networks of criminals scattered all over the place. As the war started, they quickly separated and started attacking the legitimate infrastructure of the other side and also their former accomplices.
I'm sorry, are you accusing Ukraine of "state terrorism" against a nation that is actively occupying and bombing them while their state media calls them subhumans and pines for the eradication of their nation?
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[ 24.3 ms ] story [ 970 ms ] thread"The agency is affiliated with Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, and it supports sectors such as the military, civil aviation, agriculture, and maritime."
Some operations require good weather, so having better weather forecasting is an advantage.
There are a huge number of valid strategic-level targets that are dual-use. Oil refineries, lubricants and ball bearings factories, etc.
Should the US and China get into a shooting war, you can absolutely expect them to be shooting down "weather satellites" pointing at each other's territory.
Or for importing into rocket and artillery systems for accurate targeting.
Or for flight planning of aircraft.
[0] https://www.ksat.com/weather/2022/06/06/how-the-forecast-on-...
I feel much better about this kind of "collateral damage" than Russia blowing up Ukrainian grain silos, apartment buildings, and hydroelectric dams.
It's fine to have opinions over how wars should be fought and where to draw lines, but sadly implementing those opinions and having them survive contact with the reality of war is only realistic if all parties agree on the battlefield. We pretty much just have the Geneva Conventions for this, which Russia has been ignoring[1] anyways by attacking targets like grain silos.
[1] https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/api-1977/arti...
Not that the hackers would have had time to pick through data to delete only the stuff that might be useful to military though.
You see terrorist groups like ISIS going through countries blowing up monuments and historical sites to wipe out history, culture, and the hard work of it's citizens, and I feel this is part of the same. It's just unfortunate all around.
(I'm not conflating the Ukrainian military groups as terrorists for anybody ready to jump the gun and chastise me, it's just an observation, and it's disappointing I have to clarify this.)
https://www.wired.com/story/notpetya-cyberattack-ukraine-rus...