VICE

This week on "Vice,"

a deep dive into Russian hacking.

Is there any personal information of mine

that you couldn't have gotten access to?

If someone wants to hack you, they're gonna be able to.

And then, the race to stop

the next global pandemic.

We are walking into the Zika Forest.

There are mosquitoes flying all around me right now.

Doesn't fill me with warm and fuzzies.

Outbreaks are inevitable,

pandemics are optional.

Go, go, go!

We are not animals!

Russia's been in the news a lot lately

for allegedly hacking the 2016 US election.

The Russian government pursued

a multi-faceted influence campaign

in the run-up to the election,

including aggressive use of cyber-capabilities.

Russian cyber-criminals

have been accused of everything from digital bank robberies

to tampering with critical infrastructure.

So we sent Gianna Toboni to investigate

the severity of this growing threat.

We're about an hour outside of Portland, Maine.

It's a pretty rural part of the state,

and we're heading into this Sheriff's Department,

because they've been hacked,

along with every other police department in the county.

This is the office where we received the virus.

um, right here at this terminal.

We didn't know anything had happened until, again,

the system started to slow down.

Files weren't accessible, we started getting error messages.

This is a copy

of the ransom information.

Now, right on the top here it has "Cryptowall 3.0."

It was a readme-type file.

Um... don't ask me to explain that.

Um, "What does this mean?

This means that the structure and data within your files

have been irrevocably changed,

um, and you won't be able to work with them,

read them, or see them."

What did you end up doing after you read this?

We ended up clicking on the...

the IT folks went to the, um...

the http address,

and were able to locate

the request for ransom

that they were asking for in bitcoin.

I'd never heard of a bitcoin...

... at that point, myself. You know what I mean?

You know, we're a law enforcement agency, right?

And my first reaction was,

"I'll be damned if I pay ransom."

It's the cardinal rule, right? Never negotiate.

We're the police, you can't ransom us.

Which, uh, obviously I had a rude awakening there,

and actually, I was really surprised

when our IT folks recommended that...

that we pay the ransom.

We've made several changes since then,

and we were not successful.

Another e-mail came through, and low and behold,

we started to experience the problem again.

You guys paid twice.

What makes you think these hackers won't come back again?

We've been fortunate not to have encountered the virus again,

but I'm not kidding myself.

I don't believe we're a hundred percent immune.

A cyber-attack has spread to every corner of the world.

Lincoln County, Maine, is not alone.

Across the country, thousands of police stations,

hospitals, and businesses,

have been hit by ransomware attacks.

In 2016 alone,

Americans paid close to a billion dollars

in digital ransom.

This massive uptick in attacks

has the Department of Homeland Security on high alert.

We went to their National Cybersecurity

& Communications Integration Center

to see just how dire the situation is.

Thank you.

So, in order to get into this control room here,

yeah, we've got to leave our phones behind.

Ultra secure in here.

Wow.

So, this is our main watch-floor

for the National Cybersecurity

& Communications Integration Center.

And this is where we have our 24/7 watch operations

looking for threats and incidents

across the federal government

and in our critical infrastructures domestically.

- We're hearing a lot about ransomware. - Mm-hmm.

- Are you concerned about that? - Yes.

Ransomware has expanded significantly.

Existing organizations are now taking advantage of the Internet.

What is the nature of the type of hacking

that we see in the US

that originates in Russian-speaking countries?

Everything from cyber-criminals,

um, to more organized capabilities,

and the Russian influence in our election process.

We put out, um,

what we call a joint-analysis report back in December.

This report was the first time government officials

published evidence of the 2016 Russian election hack,

which showed Russia's ability to penetrate

major American networks.

To understand why Russia has become such a hub for hacking,

we traveled to Moscow.

Andrei Soldatov is an investigative journalist

who recently wrote a definitive account

of Russia's cyber-espionage.

Of course, it was huge news in the US

when the DNC and Clinton campaign e-mails were hacked,

but is there really any evidence to show that direct link?

And how do we know that?

So you can say with certainty that those hackers

were working with the Russian government?

To actually see Russian hacking at work,

we went to one of the country's

biggest gatherings of hackers.

Welcome to Russia's biggest cyber-security conference.

You have guys who are hacking into ATM machines right here,

into BMWs, Teslas.

The average age here is probably 25, 26.

You have teenagers. Everyone seems to be under 30.

Cyber-security expert and even organizer,

Andrew Bershadsky, showed us around.

All right, so what are you excited about here?

Can you show me some things?

So, what's their angle? If they attack this,

what do they want to happen?

We wanted to see hacking in real-time,

so we asked former NSA hacker, Patrick Wardle,

and his associate, Mikhail Sosonkin,

to put my personal cyber-security to the test.

Well, you know, this was your first hacker conference,

and we really wanted to make the experience very authentic,

so we decided to just

hack you in as many ways as possible.

While I thought our crew was filming background footage,

they were in fact capturing me getting hacked.

Generally, there's two main ways to hack people:

Remotely and with physical access.

Um, so we designed some attacks to do both of these.

Basically, we set up wireless access points

and we made it look like it was a hotel Wi-Fi.

But it was, like, a little thing that suggested

the correct one... it says "guest."

So you probably thought that that's the one

- you should be connecting to. - Oh, wow.

So, when you connected to it,

everything you entered in there,

like your last name, your room number,

we basically collected that.

Hotel room numbers... it's kind of what hotels use

- as an authentication key. - Oh, my God.

And with that, then we were able

to pull off a social engineering attack,

which gave us a copy of your room key.

Good afternoon.

Could you print another key for my room, please?

We needed someone to impersonate you, essentially,

and we had my lovely wife, Diana,

call up the reception and say,

"Hey, can you please give my colleague another key?"

My co-worker, Gianna, she's in room 2086.

No other questions asked,

they gave me a key to your room.

Then with that, we were able to gain access to your room,

where we installed some hidden cameras

so we could see, when you access the safe,

- what the keypad was. - Wow.

So, even if you had put your laptop

or your phone in there, it wouldn't have mattered,

- we could have gotten in. - You could have gotten in.

So, at this point, we kind of had complete access to your laptop...

- There's the binary. - Nice.

What we basically did was we installed

something called a backdoor on your system,

that would then connect out to a computer we controlled,

allowing us to execute commands on your computer.

So, at that point, we could share your screen,

see exactly what you were looking at at all times.

Uh, we could record off the webcam

to watch you as you walked around the room,

hijack your Skype sessions.

So, how did you get my credit card information?

Every time you press a button,

there is an event that happens in the machine,

and we can capture that. You can see here,

we have your credit card information

from when you were booking your trip to Cuba.

Is there any personal information of mine