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Information technology (IT) experts have expressed to The Eye grave concerns about Russia appearing now to target more NATO allies’ infrastructure, and it also shows how they have tried to attack this website too.
China is very much in the news today, but its ally should not be forgotten.
In 2023 Russian-linked hackers sent commands to railway signal sites in north-west Poland, causing 20 trains to come to a halt.
The next year they repeated that effort against Czech signalling systems, and in both cases, the targets were on routes over which aid is sent to Ukraine.
Russia’s campaign has widened now to include civilian targets with no direct link to the war at all.
In 2024 hackers disrupted a small private French water mill, possibly mistaking it for a much bigger dam, and last year they attacked a dam in south-west Norway, causing the uncontrolled flow of water for four hours.
Earlier sabotage incidents were probably carried out by ‘Sandworm’, the name cyber-security researchers have given to a unit of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, or by ‘hacktivist’ groups that serve as fronts for the agency.
The GRU has long had a reputation as a loud, aggressive and clumsy cyber actor, prioritising mayhem over stealth. For that reason, the Polish attacks were initially thought to be its handiwork.
Its believed that today, though, the perpetrators are probably hackers from the FSB, Russia’s state security service, where the unit is sometimes dubbed ‘Berserk Bear’ in the colourful nomenclature of cyber-threat companies.
Previously it was thought that the FSB was more concerned with espionage work, and not engaged in active sabotage operations, but now it appears officers there are taking a more active approach.
These attacks put centre stage how The Eye too has been a victim.
Our site always used to get a couple of ‘allow requests’ from e-mail addresses with the .ru (Russia) ending, but recently this has increased massively, and at one point there were four or five A DAY!
On the one hand it seems to show that an independent media in largely free democratic countries is getting under the skin of Vladimir Putin, which is a good thing.
On the other it shows the growing audacity of his security agencies – as countries on continental Europe know only too well!
The memories of our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry’s decades-long award-winning career in journalism (when commenting on important stories like these was always paramount), as he was gripped by the rare disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now!
Next week – ‘Dark speak easy part two’, where he reveals how a free and independent media is essential for a functioning democracy, although this does not exist in many states around the world, and new research is today showing a link between the muzzling of the media, and political corruption.
