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60-515: Cyber Partisans consists of a group of Belarusian IT workers who live abroad . In an August 2021 interview to Bloomberg, hackers shared some details about themselves: they are 15 people, none of whom are professional hackers; of them, only 3 or 4 perform the hacks, others deal with the analysis of obtained data; and some group members were penetration testers before joining the group. Members are anonymous even to each other. The group describes its activities as ethical hacking , as it goes only against

120-618: A business context, the Information Technology Association of America has defined information technology as "the study, design, development, application, implementation, support, or management of computer-based information systems". The responsibilities of those working in the field include network administration, software development and installation, and the planning and management of an organization's technology life cycle, by which hardware and software are maintained, upgraded, and replaced. Information services

180-542: A complete computing machine. During the Second World War , Colossus developed the first electronic digital computer to decrypt German messages. Although it was programmable , it was not general-purpose, being designed to perform only a single task. It also lacked the ability to store its program in memory; programming was carried out using plugs and switches to alter the internal wiring. The first recognizably modern electronic digital stored-program computer

240-475: A component of their 305 RAMAC computer system. Most digital data today is still stored magnetically on hard disks, or optically on media such as CD-ROMs . Until 2002 most information was stored on analog devices , but that year digital storage capacity exceeded analog for the first time. As of 2007 , almost 94% of the data stored worldwide was held digitally: 52% on hard disks, 28% on optical devices, and 11% on digital magnetic tape. It has been estimated that

300-797: A group is a crime in Belarus. Anthropologist Gabriella Coleman , a professor at McGill University and an expert on hacktivism and the Anonymous , commented to Bloomberg: "I don't think there are a lot of parallels to this, that they are so sophisticated and are attacking on multiple levels, it's not something I've seen before except in the movies." According to associate professor Tetyana Lokot of Dublin City University , who specializes in protest and digital rights issues in Eastern Europe, "If ever Lukashenko ends up facing prosecution in

360-555: A large volume of material, includes the archive of almost 2 million minutes of secretly recorded phone conversation audio; lists of alleged police informants; personal information about top government officials; and video footage gathered from police drones and detention centers. The group also obtained the databases for passports , all registered motor vehicles, recordings from the cameras in the Okrestina prison's isolation cells, and mortality statistics. The group shared these data with

420-450: A more efficient manner are usually seen as "just the cost of doing business." IT departments are allocated funds by senior leadership and must attempt to achieve the desired deliverables while staying within that budget. Government and the private sector might have different funding mechanisms, but the principles are more-or-less the same. This is an often overlooked reason for the rapid interest in automation and Artificial Intelligence , but

480-473: A particular letter; possible delays in message delivery (up to several days); limits on the size of one message and on the total size of messages in the mailbox (personal for users). A software and hardware complex with a web interface that provides the ability to search for information on the Internet. A search engine usually means a site that hosts the interface (front-end) of the system. The software part of

540-405: A search engine is a search engine (search engine) — a set of programs that provides the functionality of a search engine and is usually a trade secret of the search engine developer company. Most search engines look for information on World Wide Web sites, but there are also systems that can look for files on FTP servers, items in online stores, and information on Usenet newsgroups. Improving search

600-464: A technology now obsolete. Electronic data storage, which is used in modern computers, dates from World War II, when a form of delay-line memory was developed to remove the clutter from radar signals, the first practical application of which was the mercury delay line. The first random-access digital storage device was the Williams tube , which was based on a standard cathode ray tube . However,

660-580: A video with a student who was humiliated & forced to apologize. Since 2020 many students were detained and staff let go for political positions According to Yuliana Shametavets ( Russian : Юлиана Шеметовец ) on 26 April 2024, Cyberpartisans stated on their website that they had penetrated the Belarus KGB computer network in fall 2023 accessing the files of 8,600 Belarus KGB employees and that, beginning in February 2024, Cyber Partisans had suppressed

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720-487: Is a term somewhat loosely applied to a variety of IT-related services offered by commercial companies, as well as data brokers . The field of information ethics was established by mathematician Norbert Wiener in the 1940s. Some of the ethical issues associated with the use of information technology include: Research suggests that IT projects in business and public administration can easily become significant in scale. Work conducted by McKinsey in collaboration with

780-433: Is also worth noting that from a business perspective, Information technology departments are a " cost center " the majority of the time. A cost center is a department or staff which incurs expenses, or "costs", within a company rather than generating profits or revenue streams. Modern businesses rely heavily on technology for their day-to-day operations, so the expenses delegated to cover technology that facilitates business in

840-566: Is commonly held in relational databases to take advantage of their "robust implementation verified by years of both theoretical and practical effort." As an evolution of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), XML's text-based structure offers the advantage of being both machine- and human-readable . Data transmission has three aspects: transmission, propagation, and reception. It can be broadly categorized as broadcasting , in which information

900-768: Is generally an information system , a communications system , or, more specifically speaking, a computer system — including all hardware , software , and peripheral equipment — operated by a limited group of IT users, and an IT project usually refers to the commissioning and implementation of an IT system. IT systems play a vital role in facilitating efficient data management, enhancing communication networks, and supporting organizational processes across various industries. Successful IT projects require meticulous planning, seamless integration, and ongoing maintenance to ensure optimal functionality and alignment with organizational objectives. Although humans have been storing, retrieving, manipulating, and communicating information since

960-507: Is one of the priorities of the modern Internet (see the Deep Web article about the main problems in the work of search engines). Companies in the information technology field are often discussed as a group as the "tech sector" or the "tech industry." These titles can be misleading at times and should not be mistaken for "tech companies;" which are generally large scale, for-profit corporations that sell consumer technology and software. It

1020-424: Is still widely deployed more than 50 years later. IMS stores data hierarchically , but in the 1970s Ted Codd proposed an alternative relational storage model based on set theory and predicate logic and the familiar concepts of tables, rows, and columns. In 1981, the first commercially available relational database management system (RDBMS) was released by Oracle . All DMS consist of components, they allow

1080-417: Is transmitted unidirectionally downstream, or telecommunications , with bidirectional upstream and downstream channels. XML has been increasingly employed as a means of data interchange since the early 2000s, particularly for machine-oriented interactions such as those involved in web-oriented protocols such as SOAP , describing "data-in-transit rather than... data-at-rest". Hilbert and Lopez identify

1140-643: The Belarusian KGB Ivan Tertel blamed "foreign special services" for cyberattacks on government targets. In 2021, the Belarusian government (through the Belarusian Supreme Court and Ministry of Internal Affairs) declared the information resources Cyber-Partizans, its subsidiary project Cyber-Leaks, and all their Telegram channels to be an "extremist" group and a terrorist organization. Creating or participating in such

1200-580: The International Criminal Court , for example, these records are going to be incredibly important." The group was praised by the Belarusian opposition , including Franak Viačorka , a senior adviser to exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya . Andrei Sannikov , a former Belarusian diplomat and a candidate at the 2010 presidential election in Belarus , in an interview to MIT Technology Review said that "They’re making

1260-454: The Internet , which was equivalent to 51 million households. Along with the Internet, new types of technology were also being introduced across the globe, which has improved efficiency and made things easier across the globe. Along with technology revolutionizing society, millions of processes could be done in seconds. Innovations in communication were also crucial as people began to rely on

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1320-530: The University of Oxford suggested that half of all large-scale IT projects (those with initial cost estimates of $ 15 million or more) often failed to maintain costs within their initial budgets or to complete on time. Belarusian Railway Belarusian Railway ( BCh ) ( Belarusian : Беларуская чыгунка ( БЧ ) / Biełaruskaja čyhunka , Russian : Белорусская железная дорога ) is the national state-owned railway company of Belarus . It operates all of

1380-569: The official red and green flag of the country . Cyber Partisans work together with the BYPOL group, which consists of former Belarusian police officers working against Lukashenko's government. Their knowledge of database structure helps to plan and execute the Partisans' moves. In July 2021, Cyber Partisans cracked the Ministry of Internal Affairs' most sensitive databases. The group obtained

1440-531: The rail transport network in Belarus . As of 2005, the railway employs 112,173 people. The company, formed in 1992 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union , is one of the inheritors of the Soviet Railways . It administers 5,512 km of railway with ( 1,520 mm ( 4 ft  11 + 27 ⁄ 32  in ) Russian gauge ). The railway's most important station is Minsk Terminal ,

1500-432: The 16th century, and it was not until 1645 that the first mechanical calculator capable of performing the four basic arithmetical operations was developed. Electronic computers , using either relays or valves , began to appear in the early 1940s. The electromechanical Zuse Z3 , completed in 1941, was the world's first programmable computer, and by modern standards one of the first machines that could be considered

1560-542: The Belarus KGB computer network for at least two months and that this "was a response" to the Belarus KGB chief Ivan Tertel because "The KGB is carrying out the largest political repressions in the history of the country and must answer for it" and added that "We work to save the lives of Belarusians, and not to destroy them, like the repressive Belarusian special services do." In a speech on state TV in July 2021, head of

1620-410: The Internet alone while e-commerce a decade later resulted in $ 289 billion in sales. And as computers are rapidly becoming more sophisticated by the day, they are becoming more used as people are becoming more reliant on them during the twenty-first century. Early electronic computers such as Colossus made use of punched tape , a long strip of paper on which data was represented by a series of holes,

1680-461: The Partisans provided to Current Time at the outlet's request to prove the veracity of the leak. During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine , Cyber Partisans was one of three main Belarusian dissident groups that worked to stymie the Belarusian involvement in the Russian invasion , specifically by targeting railroad supply lines. (The other groups were Belarusian railway workers and defectors from

1740-417: The ability to transfer both plain text and formatted, as well as arbitrary files; independence of servers (in the general case, they address each other directly); sufficiently high reliability of message delivery; ease of use by humans and programs. Disadvantages of e-mail: the presence of such a phenomenon as spam (massive advertising and viral mailings); the theoretical impossibility of guaranteed delivery of

1800-527: The appearance of the term in 1990 contained within documents for the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Innovations in technology have already revolutionized the world by the twenty-first century as people were able to access different online services. This has changed the workforce drastically as thirty percent of U.S. workers were already in careers in this profession. 136.9 million people were personally connected to

1860-567: The application of statistical and mathematical methods to decision-making , and the simulation of higher-order thinking through computer programs. The term is commonly used as a synonym for computers and computer networks , but it also encompasses other information distribution technologies such as television and telephones . Several products or services within an economy are associated with information technology, including computer hardware , software , electronics, semiconductors, internet , telecom equipment , and e-commerce . Based on

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1920-408: The border entry and exit data to the investigative journalism group Bellingcat . In February 2023 the group revealed that they cracked into Roscomnadzor , Russian internet censorship agency. The attack disrupted the internal network of the organization. The crackers obtained between 1.2 and 2 Terabytes of data including 1.5 million emails and 200 thousand of internal documents. Cyber Partisans gave

1980-617: The central station of the capital. BCh reports to the ministry of transport and as of 2010 was composed of 84 organizations; 46 enterprises, 38 institutions, and 7 factories/plants. The rail network is divided into 6 departments: named after the regions around Minsk , Baranovichi , Brest , Gomel , Mogilev and Vitebsk . Belarusian Railway was included in the sanctions lists of Canada in November 2022 and Ukraine in January 2023, respectively. Canada also blacklisted Vladimir Morozov,

2040-464: The computer to communicate through telephone lines and cable. The introduction of the email was considered revolutionary as "companies in one part of the world could communicate by e-mail with suppliers and buyers in another part of the world..." Not only personally, computers and technology have also revolutionized the marketing industry, resulting in more buyers of their products. During the year of 2002, Americans exceeded $ 28 billion in goods just over

2100-419: The constant pressure to do more with less is opening the door for automation to take control of at least some minor operations in large companies. Many companies now have IT departments for managing the computers , networks, and other technical areas of their businesses. Companies have also sought to integrate IT with business outcomes and decision-making through a BizOps or business operations department. In

2160-431: The data they store to be accessed simultaneously by many users while maintaining its integrity. All databases are common in one point that the structure of the data they contain is defined and stored separately from the data itself, in a database schema . In recent years, the extensible markup language (XML) has become a popular format for data representation. Although XML data can be stored in normal file systems , it

2220-527: The data to journalists, including Mediazona and Süddeutsche Zeitung . In July 2023, the group claimed that they attacked the Belarusian State University (BSU) and got 3 terabytes of data, encrypted and wiped the university's servers. BSU officials denied the fact of attack, though their website was down for several days. The reason of the attack was explained in a tweet: We started working on this attack 2 months ago after BSU posted

2280-504: The earliest writing systems were developed, the term information technology in its modern sense first appeared in a 1958 article published in the Harvard Business Review ; authors Harold J. Leavitt and Thomas L. Whisler commented that "the new technology does not yet have a single established name. We shall call it information technology (IT)." Their definition consists of three categories: techniques for processing,

2340-566: The emergence of information and communications technology (ICT). By the year of 1984, according to the National Westminster Bank Quarterly Review , the term information technology had been redefined as "The development of cable television was made possible by the convergence of telecommunications and computing technology (…generally known in Britain as information technology)." We then begin to see

2400-404: The exponential pace of technological change (a kind of Moore's law ): machines' application-specific capacity to compute information per capita roughly doubled every 14 months between 1986 and 2007; the per capita capacity of the world's general-purpose computers doubled every 18 months during the same two decades; the global telecommunication capacity per capita doubled every 34 months;

2460-455: The field of data mining  — "the process of discovering interesting patterns and knowledge from large amounts of data"  — emerged in the late 1980s. The technology and services it provides for sending and receiving electronic messages (called "letters" or "electronic letters") over a distributed (including global) computer network. In terms of the composition of elements and the principle of operation, electronic mail practically repeats

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2520-455: The first planar silicon dioxide transistors by Frosch and Derick in 1957, the MOSFET demonstration by a Bell Labs team. the planar process by Jean Hoerni in 1959, and the microprocessor invented by Ted Hoff , Federico Faggin , Masatoshi Shima , and Stanley Mazor at Intel in 1971. These important inventions led to the development of the personal computer (PC) in the 1970s, and

2580-443: The first transistorized computer developed at the University of Manchester and operational by November 1953, consumed only 150 watts in its final version. Several other breakthroughs in semiconductor technology include the integrated circuit (IC) invented by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1959, silicon dioxide surface passivation by Carl Frosch and Lincoln Derick in 1955,

2640-531: The government's security forces). Cyber Partisans launched the first attack on the railway's systems in late January 2022, in the days immediately before the invasion slowing the movement of Russian troops before they had crossed the border. The group said that it had penetrated the Belarusian Railway 's network system the previous month, in December 2021. A spokesperson for Cyber Partisans said that

2700-521: The group affirmed that it was not collaborating with any foreign government, but "we are not against it, as long as it aligns with our depicted goals, to change the regime." The Cyber Partisans originated in September 2020 after the 2020 Belarusian presidential election and subsequent protests against its falsification by Alexander Lukashenko . The protests were brutally suppressed by the government's police and security forces. Initially, actions by

2760-408: The group were symbolic: group members hacked state news websites ( All-National TV , Belarus-1 ) and streamed videos showing scenes of police brutality, and inserted the names of Lukashenko and the minister of Internal Affairs , Yury Karayeu , to a police most wanted list . The group also hacked government websites to add the white-red-white flag , which is favored by the Belarusian dissidents, over

2820-488: The information stored in it and delay-line memory was volatile in the fact that it had to be continuously refreshed, and thus was lost once power was removed. The earliest form of non-volatile computer storage was the magnetic drum , invented in 1932 and used in the Ferranti Mark 1 , the world's first commercially available general-purpose electronic computer. IBM introduced the first hard disk drive in 1956, as

2880-538: The introduction of computer science-related courses in K-12 education . Ideas of computer science were first mentioned before the 1950s under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University , where they had discussed and began thinking of computer circuits and numerical calculations. As time went on, the field of information technology and computer science became more complex and

2940-493: The journalists who calculated the excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic in Belarus . They concluded that from March 2020 to March 2021, this figure was 32,000 people, 14.4 times more than the authorities reported. The group published passport data of Lukashenko and his sons to prove that they really hacked that database. The authenticity of the data was also demonstrated by data on journalists from Current Time TV , which

3000-432: The railway company's system was vulnerable and ran on an outdated Windows XP operating system . The group used a modified form of ransomware to paralyze the railway system, saying that it would return to computer network to normal if the Belarusian government released 50 political prisoners in need of medical treatment and stopped Russian forces from entering Belarus. Partisans cracked and encrypted internal databases of

3060-425: The railway. The group targeted freight rail to disrupt Russian military movements and cargo bound for China; the group said that it deliberately avoided affecting passenger rail . The group also obtained access to a database of all border crossing records. To prove it, one of the group members provided a Guardian journalist "a full list of his travel records to Belarus going back to 2016". Cyber Partisans provided

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3120-738: The regime's crimes transparent. The information they're getting by hacking the state really is very eloquent in witnessing the criminal activities of the regime against the citizens." The group was the subject of the BBC Radio 4 series Digital Human episode that aired in March 2022. Information technology Information technology ( IT ) is a set of related fields that encompass computer systems, software , programming languages , and data and information processing, and storage. IT forms part of information and communications technology (ICT). An information technology system ( IT system )

3180-515: The state and do not harm to ordinary citizens. In late January 2022, the group reportedly consisted of some 30 people. Its spokesperson, Yuliana Shemetovets, is based in New York . An anonymous spokesperson for the group told in an interview to MIT Technology Review : "What we want is to stop the violence and repression from the terroristic regime in Belarus and to bring the country back to democratic principles and rule of law ." In 2021 and 2022,

3240-503: The storage and processing technologies employed, it is possible to distinguish four distinct phases of IT development: pre-mechanical (3000 BC — 1450 AD), mechanical (1450 — 1840), electromechanical (1840 — 1940), and electronic (1940 to present). Information technology is a branch of computer science , defined as the study of procedures, structures, and the processing of various types of data. As this field continues to evolve globally, its priority and importance have grown, leading to

3300-417: The system of regular (paper) mail, borrowing both terms (mail, letter, envelope, attachment, box, delivery, and others) and characteristic features — ease of use, message transmission delays, sufficient reliability and at the same time no guarantee of delivery. The advantages of e-mail are: easily perceived and remembered by a person addresses of the form user_name@domain_name (for example, somebody@example.com);

3360-405: The world's storage capacity per capita required roughly 40 months to double (every 3 years); and per capita broadcast information has doubled every 12.3 years. Massive amounts of data are stored worldwide every day, but unless it can be analyzed and presented effectively it essentially resides in what have been called data tombs: "data archives that are seldom visited". To address that issue,

3420-403: The worldwide capacity to store information on electronic devices grew from less than 3  exabytes in 1986 to 295 exabytes in 2007, doubling roughly every 3 years. Database Management Systems (DMS) emerged in the 1960s to address the problem of storing and retrieving large amounts of data accurately and quickly. An early such system was IBM 's Information Management System (IMS), which

3480-503: Was able to handle the processing of more data. Scholarly articles began to be published from different organizations. Looking at early computing, Alan Turing , J. Presper Eckert , and John Mauchly were considered some of the major pioneers of computer technology in the mid-1900s. Giving them such credit for their developments, most of their efforts were focused on designing the first digital computer. Along with that, topics such as artificial intelligence began to be brought up as Turing

3540-496: Was beginning to question such technology of the time period. Devices have been used to aid computation for thousands of years, probably initially in the form of a tally stick . The Antikythera mechanism , dating from about the beginning of the first century BC, is generally considered the earliest known mechanical analog computer , and the earliest known geared mechanism. Comparable geared devices did not emerge in Europe until

3600-468: Was the Manchester Baby , which ran its first program on 21 June 1948. The development of transistors in the late 1940s at Bell Laboratories allowed a new generation of computers to be designed with greatly reduced power consumption. The first commercially available stored-program computer, the Ferranti Mark I , contained 4050 valves and had a power consumption of 25 kilowatts. By comparison,

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