On June 7, 2017, CNN reported, referring to US officials that Russian hackers broke into the Qatari news agency and provoked a scandal in the region, which resulted in nine countries accusing Doha of supporting terrorists and breaking off diplomatic relations with that country. Oleg Demidov, PIR Center cybersecurity strategy consultant, believes that such stories create a toxic atmosphere of distrust in the international arena, but it can be avoided.
In the Kremlin the message about the "Russian trace" in Qatar crisis was called "fake news". It was noted, that since July last year this is not the first black PR package by the Western media about the attempts of Russia to influence politics in other countries.
According to the Valdai Club expert Oleg Demidov, this is another serial story: there is an incident, Russian hackers are accused; open data with technical analysis that would confirm the reliability of the charges is not provided. "In the end, it turns out a strange situation when Russian hackers are "responsible", although there is no evidence of this, but there is only a politicized rhetoric around the incident," he said in an interview with www.valdaiclub.com.
Such events do not benefit international relations and do not bring trust between countries regarding cyber-incidents.
"This once again underlines that it is necessary to create a wider international framework to share information on cybersecurity incidents and how to respond to them," Demidov said.
Obviously, the absence of such a system today is limited by the lack of trust between countries. But it can be done through the private sector, through intermediaries, by stimulating and supporting their efforts at the state level. "Otherwise, such stories will happen all the time and trust between countries on issues of cybersecurity and behavior in cyberspace will fall to an extremely low level," the expert believes.
Demidov noted that this is not the only possible option. "The current technical and organizational capabilities allow the establishment of mechanisms for the exchange of information on incidents, early warning, prevention, disclosure of data for joint incident management. I'm not even talking about investigations - only about managing and minimizing the consequences of computer incidents."
The expert believes that the process of such mechanisms establishment can contribute to the emergence of at least a minimum of trust between countries. "Without it everything will be bad, because such stories undermine political dialogue and constructive interaction between states in the international arena, create a toxic atmosphere of distrust. We need to move away from this, "Oleg Demidov concluded.
