WEEK 10. MITNICK'S FORMULA

Russia is my home country, and the Mitnick's formula makes it much easier to analyze the security situation there. I have no experience working in Russian companies, so I will try to base my analysis solely on information I've got from news and social media and from my relatives.

According to the Mitnick's formula, security comes from the three following aspects:

Technology

In my opinion, technology is the strongest element out of the three. Although Russia is a bit more delayed in development of modern technologies, compared to the Europe or America, the difference is not that crucial. Firewalls and antivirus programs are easily accessible and preinstalled on most of the computers. There are enough skilled IT specialists who are able to set up corporate networks properly.

Training

I would call security training in Russia at best unsatisfactory, which in certain occasions turns into ridiculous. I am still under impression of the Telegram story from a couple of years ago. Telegram is an instant messaging application developed by brothers Pavel and Nikolai Durov. It features leveraged security with end-to-end encryption. 

The Russian government has requested the private data of the Telegram users from the service owners and has received a negative answer. Telegram team has specified that even if they would be willing to provide the access to the data, it would be useless anyways, as the service utilizes end-to-end encryption. The government has then requested the decryption keys. 

I am not even mentioning how unethical this story is, but the level of security knowledge and training of the government security specialists is definitely below satisfactory. And if this is the level of awareness of the country's top specialists then there isn't much to say about the usual people.

Policy

I believe that although in big IT corporations, the policies are as developed as in the European countries, the doesn't apply to all other kinds of companies, where nobody watches over the password stickers glued to the computer screen. 

There is a huge room for improvement.