Russia’s Information Sovereignty: Cyber Threats, Historical Lessons & Path to Security

12 Sep, 2025
| Salome K

Russia’s Information Security Code

On September 11, 2025, the television channel Zvezda aired the television film *CODE ACCESS WITH PAVEL VEDENYAPIN – The Mystery of the Planted Flash Drive: How the Cyber War Began* (September 11, 2025).

The film discusses cybercrimes, cyber weapons, and their dangers to humanity. The beginning of the film focuses on a cyber attack on Aeroflot, which disrupted its operations.

Andrei Petrovich Kurilo, the former deputy head of the Main Directorate of Information Security and Information Protection of the Bank of Russia, spoke in the program. He is a member of the Expert Council of the Security Committee of the State Duma of the Russian Federation. I worked with him at the Central Bank of Russia from the beginning of his tenure there. Prior to that, we were acquainted when he worked in the Security Council of Russia, and I was a member of the Expert Council of the Security Council.

The program provided many examples of cyber attacks that caused significant damage to countries. These included the STUXNET virus, which destroyed 1,000 nuclear centrifuges in Iran. As stated in the program, this virus set back Iran’s development by many years.

However, surprisingly, the program did not mention a single word about how, in the early 1990s, trillions of rubles were stolen from the Central Bank of Russia through fraudulent payment orders (fake avizo), threatening Russia’s very existence. https://lenta.ru/articles/2023/04/07/avizoo/amp/

It was only the hardware encryptors produced by my company, “Ankort,” that saved Russia from financial collapse.

So why does the program conclude by raising the question of the need to create a national firewall, similar to China’s, to protect Russians from Western cyber threats?

This immediately raises another question: Does Russia produce the necessary microchips, hardware servers, and its own operating system to build a reliable firewall? Or will Russia rely on China’s assistance, as it does with passenger cars?

Why does Russia not learn from the bitter lessons of the past? After all, Andrei Petrovich Kurilo was transferred to the office of the Presidential Envoy to the Chechen Republic in 1996. He should be well aware of the tragedy of Russian troops during the Chechen wars due to the lack of reliable information protection. Let me recall the book by General Troshev, the commander of Russian forces in Chechnya, *Notes of a Trench General*, which described how the army paid with blood due to the absence of encryptors. My company donated 3,000 encryptors to Russian troops fighting in Chechnya.

Why does Russian central television not point out the true path Russia must take to preserve its information sovereignty in the future? This path lies in creating its own production of highly intelligent chips that are not only on par with but even surpass foreign counterparts. This was the case in the USSR in the late 1980s, as detailed in my book *Espionage, Encryptors, and Chocolate*.

P.S. Last year, “phone scammers” stole over 500 billion rubles from Russian citizens. This was due to the low level of information security protecting Russian citizens’ personal data, including the weak information security of various messaging apps operating under foreign operating systems.

The United States is investing trillions of dollars in developing superchips not only for national information security but also for creating cyber weapons. U.S. President Donald Trump issued an order to rename the Department of Defense to the Department of War, thus restoring the historical name used since the late 18th century.

It is worth noting that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), which is part of the Department of War, was established in 1953, modeled after the Soviet organization GUSS under the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). It receives state funding that exceeds the combined funding of all U.S. intelligence agencies.

Additionally, on the orders of Joseph Stalin, the USSR developed the specialized computer “Vesna,” which at the time could decrypt almost any cipher in the world and was built on Soviet electronic components. Why did Stalin create GUSS? Let me remind you that thanks to the efforts of British radio intelligence, led by Alan Turing, who created the Colossus computer capable of decrypting the German Enigma cipher machine, 30,000 German submariners were killed, and nearly all submarines of Nazi Germany were destroyed. Winston Churchill believed that decrypting the Enigma machine allowed Great Britain to win World War II.

Thanks to Soviet radio intelligence, the wars in Korea (1950s), Vietnam, the peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Suez Crisis (1973) were won. All military technology operated on Soviet electronics. In the USSR, it was strictly prohibited to use foreign microchips in military technology and critical national systems, including energy.

What is modern cyber weapons and their effectiveness? Thanks to them, the armies of Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad were defeated within two weeks.