There won't be tens of thousands of яблоко-II computers sitting in apartment flats running buggy copies of Gorkysoft for hackers to play with.
You know it's relatively easy to build your own computer, right?
I'm not talking about going on newegg and buying a CPU, RAM, etc. and assembling them. I'm talking about getting integrated chips and building a computer from scratch.
A friend of mine has built a full computer, entirely for free, with chips he made with a rented fab unit running an OS he wrote, all in a simple metal case he machined. Keep in mind, he was a college sophomore at the time. A very talented sophomore, yes, but no better off than an educated Soviet hacker might be.
We could replace rented fab units with a black market system. With a couple of decades The amount of power the computers would have is pretty much nil. But, to be honest, power and speed isn't all that necessary for simple hacking.
The real concern is going to be internet connections. Assuming all routing hardware is controlled by the government (it will be), it'll become nearly impossible for hackers to get in contact with the west or any important servers as long as the USSR has a halfway competent security team (which they almost certainly will). The thing about hacking is tricks only work once. As soon as a security engineer has reverse engineered a hack, it's almost always a matter of a few hours, if not minutes, to patch the flaw.
And you're assuming that computers remain completely restricted. Remember,
they were allowed after glasnost. You're not just assuming a surviving Soviet Union, you're assuming a surviving Soviet Union that never had a glasnost, which changes the game a little. It's one thing if we had agreed that liberalization was the downfall of the Soviet Union and the only way the nation would've survived was a lack of it, but not everyone has agreed on that. At the very least, you should mention any assumptions.
