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TOP KGB DEFECTOR Oleg Gordievsky died in his UK home at the age of 86.
Code-named Hetman, Gordievsky was one of the most important spies in Britain during the Cold War.
Surrey Police said on 4 March, officers were called to an address in Godalming where “an 86-year-old man was found dead at the property”.
It said counter-terrorism officers are leading the investigation but “the death is not currently being treated as suspicious” and “there is nothing to suggest any increased risk to members of the public”.
For more than a decade, Gordievsky’s reports gave Britain invaluable insights into the thinking of the Soviet leadership and the covert machinations of the KGB.
Gordievsky is made a Companion of the Order of Saint Michael and St George in the UK Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
In the early 1980s he was able to warn the West that fears among the paranoid Soviet leadership of a surprise Nato nuclear attack had brought the two sides perilously close to war, prompting US President Ronald Reagan to dial down his anti-USSR rhetoric.
His intelligence was subsequently crucial in guiding Margaret Thatcher in her early contacts with the reformist Mikhail Gorbachev, whose ascent to power helped bring the Cold War to a close.
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But in 1985, just as he had been appointed to the key post of head of the KGB residency in London, he came under suspicion as a British spy.
Summoned back to Moscow where he was drugged and interrogated, he quickly realised that his life was in danger and he needed to escape.
Using a long pre-arranged plan, a signal was relayed to his MI6 handlers.
A man walking past him in the street in Moscow carrying a Harrods bag and eating a Mars bar was the sign that his message had been received and the rescue was under way.
On 2 August 1985, in an operation personally approved by prime minister Margaret Thatcher, two MI6 officers, Raymond Asquith, great-grandson of former Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith, and Andrew Gibbs, managed to give the Soviet surveillance the slip and smuggle their man across the border into Finland hidden in the boot of a car.
In his absence, Gordievsky was sentenced to death in Russia for treason.
Meanwhile, he established a new life, living in a safe house in London, writing a number of books and being received by Thatcher in Chequers and Reagan in the Oval Office.
Reagan’s meeting with Oleg Gordievsky in the Oval Office, July 1987 Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
In 2007, the former KGB officer was honoured by Queen Elizabeth II, being made a Companion of the Order of Saint Michael and St George (CMG) in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace.
It was, the press noted, the same honour held by the fictional superspy James Bond.
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“Lizard Squad the group behind the attacks, appears to have suffered its own security issues”…. Ah No Quinton. The 18year old probably didn’t have a clue how to Hash/Encrypt passwords, just some script kiddie!
Hardly a security issue. I’d would imagine he used something like Visual Basic to make the program.
What does that say about Sony & Microsoft when a script kiddy with a poor understanding of security can perform ddos on a major service provider?
It is basic security to have routers, software or firewalls which can recognise a ddos and start blocking the IP addresses of those infected/attacking
Routers and firewalls have limited bandwidth and if that bandwidth is exceeded you will have connection issues. That’s what happens in most DDoS’s so blocking the DoSing IP’s isn’t going to help. Some services such as CloudFlare can handle the huge bandwidth spikes caused by many DDoS’s so for a few quid you can outsource your DDoS protection to them for less than the cost of extra bandwidth that would offset the attack.
That’s just it though, their servers are adequate and probably fairly robust, but at the same time, when you have 90,000 fans from Cork and Kilkenny coming up to dublin for a hurling match then and you’re trying to walk down O’Connell street…. multi factor authentication would cut this out or at least stem it, but might make it a pain in the hole to implement.
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