Hi, I'm Ryan Levy.

Welcome to Cyber reasons Malicious Life. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, most of Russia's technology sector was in shambles, suffering from a severe lack of funds

and infrastructure.

Many of the people that were able to do so fled the country in the hope of a better future.

While the West experienced a dot-com boom, Russia was still back in the Dark Ages, so to speak.

In this vacuum, a group of former KGB

operatives took the initiative and started an ISP, internet service provider

based in St. Petersburg, called the Russian Business Network,

RBN for short.

As far as we can tell, RBN was a legitimate service provider,

not much different from other ISPsPs you might be familiar with such as Verizon or AT&T.

But it didn't stay like that for long. It took some time, but in the late 1990s the Russian state

started to sponsor technological initiatives to bootstrap the development of its high-tech industry and try to catch up with the rest of the world.

The government began to invest in the with the rest of the world.

The government began to invest in the private sector and encouraged more and more technology

companies to expand overseas.

For that reason, it established in 2007 a new state corporation called Ross Technology,

literally Russian Technologies, later renamed to Ross Tech, and transferred some 450 struggling high-tech companies to its ownership.

Rostek orchestrated the reforms needed to enable the alieniling company's growth.

The Russian government had another more secretive reason

for establishing Rostek.

In a directive published in November of 2007, President Putin ordered the Russian Federation to engage in quote

...