Russia’s cyberwar on Ukraine largely failed and Moscow is increasingly targeting Kyiv’s European allies, US and French analysts said yesterday.
French firm Thales SA said in a report that Russia was hitting Poland, and the Nordic and Baltic countries with an arsenal of cyberweapons aiming to sow divisions and promote anti-war messages.
Microsoft Corp said in a threat assessment earlier this month that Russian actors had launched attacks in at least 17 European countries in the first six weeks of this year.
Photo: Reuters
Thales and Microsoft said that Russia’s invasion was accompanied by widespread cyberattacks in Ukraine, but they were repelled.
“Cyberwarfare didn’t deliver the game-changing blow that Russia hoped for,” Thales’ technical director for cyberdefense Ivan Fontarensky told reporters.
Both firms said that Russia shifted focus to other European countries late last year.
“In the third quarter of 2022, Europe was dragged into a high-intensity hybrid cyberwar at a turning point in the conflict,” Thales vice president for cybersolutions Pierre-Yves Jolivet said.
Jolivet said that countries outside Ukraine were facing a “massive wave” of distributed denial-of-service attacks, when a server is flooded with requests that crash the network.
These attacks were increasingly carried out by “hacktivist” groups aligned with the Kremlin rather than official groups, and they aimed to sow chaos rather than destroy infrastructure, Thales said.
Poland, Latvia and Sweden were among the most-affected countries, the Thales report said.
Microsoft said in its assessment that attacks this year in Europe were largely aimed at government entities for espionage purposes.
It said that 21 percent of attacks outside Ukraine since the start of the war had hit the US.
While attacks outside Ukraine were often low-level harassment, Microsoft said that Russia might deploy more damaging cybertools in the future.
“Should Russia suffer more setbacks on the battlefield, Russian actors may seek to expand their targeting of military and humanitarian supply chains by pursuing destructive attacks beyond Ukraine and Poland,” it said.
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