[papito]

The United States is still better at technology, and Russia is better at espionage. Never underestimate the underdog.

There was a massive article on the modern KGB under Putin in 2017(?), I think in the Atlantic. They basically managed to hack into some offline Pentagon systems by distributing infected USB drives around that location, through different outlets, in the hopes that an unsuspecting target will use a USB drive on a secure system, and then insert it on a wired machine. Boom. It worked.

[Wowfunhappy]

I think you may be thinking of Stuxnet, which was created by the US and Israel and targeted Iranian nuclear reactors.

If you were trying to steal data this way, how would you get it back out of the infected machine? Stuxnet didn't have this problem, because its goal was purely to sabotage.

[sansnomme]

So basically the same trick as Stuxnet?

[t-writescode]

Wasn’t Stuxnet the other way around?

[hydrox24]

Is the article you are talking about "What Putin Really Wants" by Julia Ioffe[0]? It was published in January 2018. It doesn't have the USB key story you're talking about though.

[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/putins-...

[papito]

Ah! I was wrong on two counts. This was in the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/trump-putin-an...

And the breach happened in Kabul, NOT the Pentagon.