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      Amid air raids and electricity shortages, a Ukrainian artist paints the Russian invasion

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 27 March - 14:00

    For Sana Shahmuradova Tanska, art-making became a compulsive way to process the anxiety of living in a war zone

    To look at Sana Shahmuradova Tanska’s paintings is to sense that something is awry, without quite knowing why. A series of canvases hanging in Artspace in Woolloomooloo as part of the Biennale of Sydney depicts strange, fantastical scenes that walk a line between Dionysian and dystopic: naked female figures in molten, fiery landscapes; mussels with moony faces swimming next to protean, fish-like forms; anthropomorphic suns weeping over rural landscapes.

    Most of the paintings were created in the artist’s studio in Kyiv, Ukraine – some before Russia’s “full invasion” of the country on 24 February 2022, and others immediately after. “That’s just how I keep track of time,” she says. “It’s like this line before and after.”

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      Share your reaction to Ukraine qualifying for Euro 2024

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 27 March - 12:04

    We would like to hear your thoughts on what Ukraine reaching the Euros means to you

    Ukraine has qualified for its first major tournament since the beginning of their war with Russia. On Tuesday, Mykhailo Mudryk’s late winner against Iceland secured a place for Ukraine at Euro 2024 .

    Before the match, midfielder Volodymyr Brazhko said: “Making the Euros will help the world to not forget about Ukraine.” This year, the tournament will be hosted by Germany in June, and Ukraine will be in Group E along with Belgium, Romania and Slovakia.

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      Russia-Ukraine war live: Russia launches fresh drone attack on Ukraine

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 27 March - 08:42 · 2 minutes

    Head of Ukrainian air force says they were able to shoot down 10 out of 13 drones launched overnight by Moscow’s forces

    The Crocus City Hall attackers attempted to flee to Belarus, according to Alexander Lukashenko .

    The Belarus president’s comments, reported by Belarus news agency Belta, undermine Moscow’s narrative that Ukraine was involved in the attack and the terrorists tried to flee there.

    Ukraine’s navy claims it has sunk or disabled a third of all Russian warships in the Black Sea in just over two years of war. Dmytro Pletenchuk from the navy said the latest strike on Saturday night hit the Russian amphibious landing ship Kostiantyn Olshansky , which was resting in dock in Sevastopol in Russia-occupied Crimea. The ship was Ukrainian before being captured by Russia in 2014.

    Pletenchuk previously announced that two other landing ships of the same type, Azov and Yamal, also were damaged in Saturday’s strike along with the Ivan Khurs intelligence ship. He said the weekend attack, using Ukraine-built Neptune missiles, also hit Sevastopol port facilities and an oil depot . “Our ultimate goal is complete absence of military ships of the so-called Russian Federation in the Azov and Black Sea regions,” Pletenchuk said.

    Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy , has replaced the secretary of Ukraine’s national security council, Oleksiy Danilov, with Oleksandr Lytvynenko, 51, head of the foreign intelligence service . Danilov had been secretary of the council since October 2019. Zelenskiy said Danilov was being transferred to new duties, with details to be made public later. “The strengthening of Ukraine and the renewal of our state system in all sectors will continue.”

    Ukraine has staged further air attacks on Belgorod, just over the border inside Russia . The regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, reported damage on the ground and claimed air defence engaged 18 incoming targets.

    Nato is considering shooting down Russian missiles that stray too close to its borders, Poland’s deputy foreign minister, Andrzej Szejna , has told Polish media outlet RMF24 . “[Russia] knew that if the missile moved further into Poland, it would be shot down. There would be a counterattack.” Poland’s armed forces said Russia violated Poland’s airspace on Sunday morning with a cruise missile launched at targets in western Ukraine.

    And away from the war there was some good news for Ukraine on the football pitch with their team qualifying for Euro 2024 following a 2-1 defeat of Iceland at a match played at Poland’s Wroclaw stadium on Tuesday night. As Jonathan Liew writes in our match report, for the thousands of Ukrainian fans who witnessed them qualifying for their first major tournament since the start of the conflict:

    In times like these even to shout the name of Ukraine is to partake in a kind of resistance.

    You can read his full report here .

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      Ukraine war briefing: ‘Third of Russia’s Black Sea fleet sunk or crippled’

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 27 March - 00:59


    Poland warns Russian missiles coming too close may be shot down; how Ukraine has ramped up making its own weapons. What we know on day 763

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      LitterDrifter USB Worm

      news.movim.eu / Schneier · Wednesday, 22 November - 21:47

    A new worm that spreads via USB sticks is infecting computers in Ukraine and beyond.

    The group­—known by many names, including Gamaredon, Primitive Bear, ACTINIUM, Armageddon, and Shuckworm—has been active since at least 2014 and has been attributed to Russia’s Federal Security Service by the Security Service of Ukraine. Most Kremlin-backed groups take pains to fly under the radar; Gamaredon doesn’t care to. Its espionage-motivated campaigns targeting large numbers of Ukrainian organizations are easy to detect and tie back to the Russian government. The campaigns typically revolve around malware that aims to obtain as much information from targets as possible.

    One of those tools is a computer worm designed to spread from computer to computer through USB drives. Tracked by researchers from Check Point Research as LitterDrifter, the malware is written in the Visual Basic Scripting language. LitterDrifter serves two purposes: to promiscuously spread from USB drive to USB drive and to permanently infect the devices that connect to such drives with malware that permanently communicates with Gamaredon-operated command-and-control servers.

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      Musk shut off Starlink to prevent Ukraine attack on Russian ships, report says

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 7 September, 2023 - 17:22

    A Starlink satellite dish sits on the ground in Ukraine.

    Enlarge / Starlink satellite dish seen on September 25, 2022, in Izyum, Kharkiv region, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (credit: Getty Images | Yasuyoshi Chiba)

    Elon Musk ordered SpaceX engineers to temporarily disable Starlink in order to thwart a Ukrainian submarine drone attack on the Russian naval fleet last year, according to a report based on a new biography of Musk. The book provides more details on a previously reported incident.

    A CNN exclusive report today said, "Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company's Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet, according to an excerpt adapted from Walter Isaacson's new biography of the eccentric billionaire titled 'Elon Musk.'"

    "As Ukrainian submarine drones strapped with explosives approached the Russian fleet, they 'lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,' Isaacson writes," the CNN report said. Ukrainian officials reportedly begged Musk to turn satellite service in the area back on.

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      Ukraine war spurs horrifying rise in extensively drug-resistant bacteria

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 11 July, 2023 - 23:04 · 1 minute

    Ukrainian medics of the battalion "Da Vinci Wolves" and "Ulf" paramedical unit transfer a wounded Ukrainian soldier to a stabilization point on the Bakhmut front as the Russia-Ukraine war continues on April 6, 2023.

    Enlarge / Ukrainian medics of the battalion "Da Vinci Wolves" and "Ulf" paramedical unit transfer a wounded Ukrainian soldier to a stabilization point on the Bakhmut front as the Russia-Ukraine war continues on April 6, 2023. (credit: Getty | Diego Herrera Carcedo/Anadolu Agency )

    Russia's invasion of Ukraine is fueling a dangerous rise in bacterial drug resistance—an alarming reality made clear by a recent case report of an injured Ukrainian soldier who became infected with six different extensively drug-resistant bacteria, one of which was resistant to every antibiotic tested.

    Health experts are sounding the alarm that the nearly unbeatable germs will likely spread beyond the war-torn country's borders. "Given the forced migration of the population, multidrug resistance of wound pathogens is now a problem not only for Ukraine but also for healthcare systems around the world, especially in the EU," Ukrainian scientists and doctors wrote in a recent letter in the Irish Journal of Medical Scientists.

    The rise of antibiotic resistance is a long-standing, critical threat to global public health. In 2019, antimicrobial resistance was directly responsible for an estimated 1.27 million deaths worldwide and linked to an estimated 4.95 million total, according to an analysis published last year in the Lancet .

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      Pro-Russian hackers target elected US officials supporting Ukraine

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 30 March, 2023 - 12:19

    Locked out.

    Enlarge / Locked out. (credit: Sean Gladwell / Getty Images )

    Threat actors aligned with Russia and Belarus are targeting elected US officials supporting Ukraine, using attacks that attempt to compromise their email accounts, researchers from security firm Proofpoint said.

    The campaign, which also targets officials of European nations, uses malicious JavaScript that’s customized for individual webmail portals belonging to various NATO-aligned organizations, a report Proofpoint published Thursday said. The threat actor—which Proofpoint has tracked since 2021 under the name TA473—employs sustained reconnaissance and painstaking research to ensure the scripts steal targets’ usernames, passwords, and other sensitive login credentials as intended on each publicly exposed webmail portal being targeted.

    Tenacious targeting

    “This actor has been tenacious in its targeting of American and European officials as well as military and diplomatic personnel in Europe,” Proofpoint threat researcher Michael Raggi wrote in an email. “Since late 2022, TA473 has invested an ample amount of time studying the webmail portals of European government entities and scanning publicly facing infrastructure for vulnerabilities all in an effort to ultimately gain access to emails of those closely involved in government affairs and the Russia-Ukraine war.”

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      Ukraine Intercepting Russian Soldiers’ Cell Phone Calls

      news.movim.eu / Schneier · Tuesday, 20 December, 2022 - 23:04

    They’re using commercial phones, which go through the Ukrainian telecom network :

    “You still have a lot of soldiers bringing cellphones to the frontline who want to talk to their families and they are either being intercepted as they go through a Ukrainian telecommunications provider or intercepted over the air,” said Alperovitch. “That doesn’t pose too much difficulty for the Ukrainian security services.”

    […]

    “Security has always been a mess, both in the army and among defence officials,” the source said. “For example, in 2013 they tried to get all the staff at the ministry of defence to replace our iPhones with Russian-made Yoto smartphones.

    “But everyone just kept using the iPhone as a second mobile because it was much better. We would just keep the iPhone in the car’s glove compartment for when we got back from work. In the end, the ministry gave up and stopped caring. If the top doesn’t take security very seriously, how can you expect any discipline in the regular army?”

    This isn’t a new problem and it isn’t a Russian problem. Here’s a more general article on the problem from 2020.