Russian Military is Going to Say Goodbye to 'Windows', and Welcome 'Astra Linux'

Russian army could very soon be replacing the Windows operating system on its military systems with Astra Linux. Furthermore Astra Linux’s Roman Mylitsyn said that switch over to Astra Linux will reduce the costs for security verification used by the Russian armed forces.

And also creators think that Microsoft products installed in the ministry’s computers being ‘vulnerable to cyber attacks’ and also there are possibilities of the existence of hidden back doors in the Windows OS.

Justin Sherman, Cyber security Policy Fellow at New America said “The Russian government doesn’t trust systems developed by foreign companies to handle sensitive data, due to fears of espionage through those systems”.

There are talks on earlier this week that, similar reasons were cited by the Chinese Military to replace the Windows OS with another OS on their military systems.

WHAT IS 'ASTRA LINUX'?

Source: https://pp.userapi.com/c854320/v854320496/3c15a/JYES-1-q6G4.jpg

Astra Linux is a Russian Linux-based computer operating system developed to meet the needs of the Russian army, other armed forces and intelligence agencies. It provides data protection up to the level of "top secret" in Russian classified information grade. It has been officially certified by Russian Defense Ministry, Federal Service for Technical and Export Control and Federal Security Service.

CREATOR OF THE OS

The creator of the OS is Scientific/Manufacturing Enterprise Rusbitech. They have named their OS releases after Hero Cities (Hero City is a Soviet honorary title awarded for outstanding heroism during World War II) in Russia and CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States).

GENERAL & SPECIAL PURPOSE RELEASES

"General Purpose" releases with code named "Oryol" aimed at "achieving small and mid-business goals".

Special Edition "Smolensk"

Source:  https://en.wikipedia.org

There are several "Special Purpose" releases.  "Smolensk" release for x86-64 PCs, "Tula" release  for networking hardware, "Novorossiysk" release  for ARM mobile devices and "Murmansk" release  for IBM System Z mainframes.

Follow official site: http://www.astralinux.ru/

Download link: https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/astra/stable/orel/iso/orel-current.iso

WHO USE 'ASTRA LINUX'?

Astra Linux Special Edition is being used in the Russian National Center for Defence Control.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org

• It is used in the Russian National Center for Defence Control and in All Russian Army computers, and Microsoft Windows will be dropped.
• There are plans to deploy Astra Linux on numerous state institutions of the Republic of Crimea and on cooperation of Rusbitech and Huawei.
• Rusbitech announced it has embedded Astra Linux to Russian-made Elbrus microprocessors.
• February 2019, Astra Linux was announced to be implemented at Tianwan Nuclear Power Plant in China.

Resources:  https://en.wikipedia.org, http://www.astralinux.ru/