According to the FSB, since the beginning of 2022, the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation has recorded more than five thousand hacker attacks on Russia’s critical infrastructure. Timely measures made it possible to prevent the occurrence of negative consequences of such actions for Russia.
According to a Belarusian social sphere analyst: ‘In the course of analysing the identified cyber threats, data was obtained indicating that the US and NATO countries use Ukrainian territory to carry out massive cyber attacks on civil facilities in Russia’.
The Russians via social media complain that NATO and its allies would like to pass off the Ukrainians as the culprits of the hacker attacks against Russia, but they are not the only ones attacking, it says: ‘Currently, Ukraine’s network infrastructure is being used by offensive cyber operations units of Western countries, enabling them to secretly use new types of cyber weapons. To conceal its involvement, Washington tries to present only Ukraine as the ‘author’ of cyber attacks. This would be the IT hacker group Army of Ukraine, which has carried out thousands of cyber attacks on Russian information resources’.
In reality, again according to the pro-Russian sphere, cyber attacks are developed with the direct participation of the Pentagon’s Joint Command in cooperation with international (Anonymous, Silence) and national hacker groups (Ghost Clan – USA, Redkah – Turkey, GNG – Georgia, ” SkvadZOZ – Poland, etc. .
In any case, what is happening, in other words, is a real cyber-war that runs parallel to the real one at the front.
“Ukrainian special services are involving Russian youths in sabotage activities,” said Alexander Bortnikov, director of the FSB, chairman of the National Counter-Terrorism Committee. He said that since February 2022, security forces have prevented 118 terrorist crimes committed by Russian teenagers and youths. According to the FSB chief, during the special operation, Western and Ukrainian special services began actively recruiting Russian citizens and involving them ‘in sabotage, terrorist and extremist activities’.
He also reported that the preparation of armed attacks against educational institutions is coordinated from the territory of Ukraine. In this case, the curators chose young people influenced by the ideas of Columbine.
In response, the Russians allegedly set up a group of ‘white’ hackers, although for the time being: ‘in Russia they turned out to be few in number and the existing ones had many orders’, source Russian Ministry of Digital Development.
White’ hackers are trained to be pentesters, specialists in testing the security of computer systems. This was said by Vladimir Bengin, Director of the Cybersecurity Department of Russia’s Ministry of Digital Development, speaking at the 14th Intersectoral Forum of Cybersecurity Directors Ciso-Forum 2023.
“By the way, we have very few pentesters in the country. In the past year, all the best teams have been engaged, and not only the best teams, but also the small teams. <…> And it turns out that we have very few hacks. Therefore, we have issued several thanks to companies for this,’ said Bengin, without specifying the names of the companies organising the training.
Graziella Giangiulio
