Atomgrad
AtomgradEspionage groups increasingly use cloud-based services and open source tools to create their infrastructure for gathering data and cyberattacks, attempting to hide their activities in the massive quantity of services and resources used by legitimate organizations. Microsoft suspended 18 Azure Active Directory “applications” that the company identified as a component of a Chinese espionage group’s command-and-control channel. Dubbed GADOLINIUM by Microsoft, the cyberattack group has adopted a combination of cloud infrastructure, which can be quickly reconstituted in the event of a takedown, and open source tools, which can help attackers’ actions blend into more legitimate activity. The group is not the only state-sponsored group to increasingly employ cloud infrastructure and open source tools, according to Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC). “MSTIC has noticed a slow trend of several nation-state activity groups migrating to open source tools in recent years ... an attempt to make discovery and attribution more difficult,” Microsoft stated in a blog post. “The other added benefit to using open-source types of kits is that the development and new feature creation is done and created by someone else at no cost.” GADOLINIUM — also known as APT40, Kryptonite Panda, and Leviathan — has focused on stealing maritime information and associated research from universities to advance China’s expansion of its navy, according to an analysis by cybersecurity services firm FireEye. While the espionage group has toyed with cloud infrastructure since 2016, the use of open source tools has only happened in the past two years, Microsoft said in its own analysis. By using commodity services and tools, the attackers not only blend into legitimate activity more completely but also become harder to identity as a specific group, says Dennis Wilson, global director of SpiderLabs at Trustwave, a security services firm. A sophisticated attacker becomes a lot harder to identify when they use open source tools and readily available cloud assets to perform their attacks,” he says, adding that “if 20 or 30 different groups are using the same malware and the same techniques, it becomes much harder to tell them apart by their tools and tactics.” Gadolinium is not the only espionage group to use common tools to attempt to escape detection. Several security firms have noted that attackers are increasingly “living off the land” by using administrat
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LL Atomgrad
Stephan Müller based his stencil font, released as FF Chernobyl in 1998, on four Cyrillic letters he had noticed on a newspaper photograph taken at the Chernobyl power plant during a site inspection in 1991, five years after the disaster. The photographer, Igor Kostin, had become known as the first to document the nuclear accident, returning to the site several times in the following years. In this particular picture, the four letters ЧАЭС were seen stencilled on a basement wall, marking the official name of the power plant.
A rich variety of stencilled type is commonly found in the context of industrial design and commercial communication from the Soviet era, as it was easily created by hand and inexpensive to produce. Intrigued by the distinctive letter-shapes born out of the atmosphere of Cold War secrecy and apocalyptic catastrophe, Stephan derived a full Latin alphabet in upper and lower case from the minimal Cyrillic sample.
In 2020, the Ukrainian type designer Yevgeniy Anfalov, born in Kyiv in 1986, the very year of the Chernobyl accident, found himself captivated by Stephan's typeface. He proposed to create a Cyrillic counterpart, thus administering a dialectical homecoming of sorts for the four letters from Chernobyl. In the course of the project, the Latin shapes were entirely redrawn, and the Ukrainian designer Viktoriya Grabowska further contributed to the Cyrillic part with additional refinements.
Finally, Luca Pellegrini brought the project to conclusion with his detailed formal revision and by completing the extensive character set.
Stephan Müller
(*1965) co-founded Lineto with Cornel Windlin and designed LL Office (1999), LL Freundschaft (2001), LL Valentine (2002) and LL Excellent (2004) among others. Since 2011, he has been professor for type design at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. In 2017, he established Forgotten Shapes, a specialist publishing venture dedicated to the digital preservation of abandonded historical typefaces, such as his Gerstner Programm (2008) and Normal Grotesk (2019). Stephan oversaw the reappraisal and expansion of his FF Chernobyl font, now called LL Atomgrad.
Yevgeniy Anfalov
(*1986) moved from Kyiv (Ukraine) to Germany in 2003. He graduated from the Hannover University of Applied Sciences and Arts and completed the MA Art Direction at ECAL in 2017. The award-winning LL Heymland (2020) was his first typeface for Lineto. In 2021, he launched Kyiv Type Foundry which offers a contemporary perspective on the Russian and Ukrainian type heritage.
Luca Pellegrini
(*1989) holds an MA in Type Design from ECAL (2019). His 2016 BA project from SUPSI on Xanti Schawinsky yielded a typeface which was later released as part of Adobe’s ‘Hidden Treasures of Bauhaus’. Luca joined Lineto in 2019 and has since designed the soon-to-be-published LL Unica77 Condensed, LL Unica77 VIP and LL Unica77 Mono families, along with an extensive symbol set for the Unica77 families. He also designed LL Rephlex (2021), and is currently working on a digital reformulation of Schawinsky’s typewriter font used in the Olivetti model ‘Studio 42’.
Credits
Designed by Stephan Müller (1998), Yevgeniy Anfalov (2020) and Luca Pellegrini (2021). Originally released by FontFont in 1998 as FF Chernobyl. Font engineering and mastering by Alphabet, Berlin.