![]() Sergei said the kind of patriotism being fostered in Russia these days was empty, even unhealthy. Isn’t it sacrilege to say such things in a place like Volgograd?, I asked them. If the French Foreign Legion takes me, I’ll go!” “I don’t care what government I work for. Was he motivated by any feelings of-“Patriotic conviction?,” Anton finished my sentence, and started to chuckle. If he were accepted, he could hope for a salary of 50,000 rubles (less than $900) a month, which was almost double the average salary in Astrakhan. “It’s prestigious, they pay well, and the work is interesting,” he said. “We did an amazing job … creating the illusion that Putin controls everything in Russia … Now it’s just funny” how much Americans attribute to him.Īnton was hoping that Minin could help him get his foot in the door at one of the state security services. “There’s nothing to do there,” his teammate Sergei added. “Everyone wants to leave,” a third-year named Anton said. ![]() I sat down at a table with a team from Astrakhan and told them I had been to their hometown once, a romantically shabby old city by the Caspian Sea. If it weren’t for students tapping at their smartphones, it would have been hard to tell that the 21st century had ever arrived. Grouchy middle-aged women in hairnets dished out bland, greasy cuisine. When we got to the cafeteria, I saw that it, too, was haunted by its Soviet past. “You know, it’s important to see how young people defended their homeland.” ![]() It’s where Nazi Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus was captured, Minin noted with reverence, and looked into the sunny distance. Now the Motherland Calls statue stands there, a 170-foot concrete woman raising a sword to summon her countrymen into battle. He was referring to another hill, where the battle was so intense, it changed the hill’s shape. “Have you been to Mamayev Kurgan yet?,” Minin asked me. Once, this was Stalingrad, a city made famous by the grueling battle fought here in the winter of 1942–43, when more than 1 million men died before the Germans lost the fight and a field marshal and the momentum of the war. Once, the river was blood, and the hill was shrapnel and pillboxes and bones. The university, a complex of stark white buildings, sits atop a steep hill with the city and the Volga River below. When the Capture the Flag competition broke for lunch, Minin and I stepped into the brightness and the wind outside. I asked whether government agencies, like the security services that conduct cyberoperations abroad, did the same. He said Russian tech firms regularly come to him to find talent. The hacking competitions are Minin’s way of preparing future generations, of “passing my accumulated knowledge on to the kiddies,” he told me. “Do you think anything has changed? And that I’d say it to a journalist?”Ĭheck out more from this issue and find your next story to read. “At the time, I signed a gag order,” he told me, smiling slyly. He wouldn’t say in which part of the army he’d done this work. ![]() “I’ve been doing cybersecurity since I was 18, since I joined the army in 1982,” Minin told me after we’d ducked out into the hallway so as not to distract the young contestants. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. JULIA IOFFE SPEAKING RUSSIAN FULLTo hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.Ĭlustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. ![]()
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