Google and Bing cooperate with various governments to a lesser or greater extent; we also know that the NSA subverted Google's internal networks for months or years (allegedly without their cooperation, but given the national security letter system, who knows).
Realistically anyone could be placing malware anywhere and the right defenses are an up-to-date browser and some level of common sense. But if we're going to start worrying about state actors, I think the odds of getting renditioned by the NSA/CIA are much higher than by "Russia", even if only because Russia is busy with a lot of other stuff at the moment.
> But if we're going to start worrying about state actors, I think the odds of getting renditioned by the NSA/CIA are much higher than by "Russia", even if only because Russia is busy with a lot of other stuff at the moment.
Renditions are one thing, that's bordering on conspiracy peddling, but using computers from people all over the world to do your bidding in a botnet? That's been a thing for many years now. I remember this already being a huge issue 15 years ago, with people taking cracks of popular software, adding a piece of malware to the crack, uploading the malware-laced package to torrent trackers and manipulating UL/DL stats to make people believe their package was the authentic one.
If I were in an army and tasked to deal with cyberwar efforts, the first thing I'd do was to set up a botnet and let it run in stealth mode, so that I'd have the resources for massive strikes ready at a moment's notice. Basically the cheater way to win in Plague Inc - achieve worldwide distribution, hide away and then ramp up all of a sudden to overwhelm the opponent.
There's plenty of botnets, sure, but those are all over the internet, and mostly used for mundane spam (penis enlargement, crypto, or whatever the current thing is), DDOS extortion, etc.. No reason for them to be tied to the Russian government - if anything they're a commodity that gets bought and sold on the market these days.
Realistically anyone could be placing malware anywhere and the right defenses are an up-to-date browser and some level of common sense. But if we're going to start worrying about state actors, I think the odds of getting renditioned by the NSA/CIA are much higher than by "Russia", even if only because Russia is busy with a lot of other stuff at the moment.