- A river runs through it part one - 17th August 2026
- Nigel Farrago - 14th August 2026
- Struck out - 14th August 2026
Disturbing news today that Russian hackers have infiltrated the email accounts of UK government officials, and that polls show civilians there are becoming uneasy about the Ukrainian war’s progress, highlight once more how The Eye too have been targeted by the country.
It was revealed last week that the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCO) was attacked, as the onslaughts appear to be becoming worse.
This could be of major concern to Vladimir Putin as he has always relied on popular support for his “special military operation” in Ukraine
There has also been significant worry that in the past, Russia could have been interfering in democratic elections, and the recent news may show that the hacking is increasing.
The indictment charged them with a computer hacking conspiracy, involving gaining unauthorised access to the computers of US persons and entities involved in the 2016 presidential election, stealing documents from those computers, and staging releases of the stolen documents to interfere with thel election.
The indictment also charged them with aggravated identity theft, false registration of a domain name, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
The District Court for the District of Columbia in Washington, D.C. issued a federal arrest warrant for each of these defendants upon the grand jury’s return of the indictment.
In Moldova too there has been enormous alarm at election time.
Leading up to a central Parliamentary vote there the Prime Minister Dorin Recean stated that Moscow was spending “hundreds of millions” of Euros as part of a “hybrid war” to try to seize power, which he described as “the final battle for our country’s future”.
The Moldovan President Maia Sandu alerted people to the “massive Russian interference”, saying the future of her country, which is flanked by Ukraine and Romania, was at stake.
The war in Ukraine made Moldova very important to Russia. According to Moldova’s Government, the Kremlin spent $200 million (the equivalent of one per cent of Moldova’s annual GDP) on disinformation and bribing voters.
On election day, bomb scares were reported at polling stations for expatriates in Italy, Romania, Spain and America.
One of Russia’s banks is said to have been opening accounts and transferring money to Moldovans in pro-Russian parts of the country.
Although tiny in comparison, we too have attracted the unwanted attention of those connected to Russian authorities.
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!
There has also been a marked increase in online ‘disinformation’ campaigns, which appears to be linked to cyber attacks by Russia.
In the past Viginum, the French foreign-disinformation watchdog, announced it had detected preparations for a large disinformation campaign in France, Germany, Poland and other European countries.
Russia has been at the forefront of internet disinformation techniques at least since 2014, when it pioneered the use of bot farms to spread fake news about its invasion of Crimea.
Viginum said it had come across a Russian network of 193 websites which it codenames ‘Portal Kombat’.
Most of these sites, such as topnews.uz.ua, were created years ago and many were left dormant. But over 50 of them, such as news-odessa.ru and pravda-en.com, have been created since 2022.
French authorities think they are ready to be activated aggressively as part of what one official calls a “massive” wave of Russian disinformation.
Viginum says it closely watched the sites over several months, and managers there have concluded that they do not themselves generate news stories, but are designed to spread “deceptive or false” content about the war in Ukraine, both on websites and via social media.
The underlying objective it would seem, is to undermine support for Ukraine in Europe, and according to the French authorities, the network is controlled by a single Russian organisation.
The UK too has suffered.
It is declared on the UK Government’s website: “Russia is one of the world’s most prolific cyber actors and dedicate significant resource into conducting cyber operations around the globe. The UK government has publicly attributed malign cyber activity to parts of three Russian Intelligence services: the FSB, SVR and GRU, with each having their own remits“.
Disturbing news like this comes after a dire warning from Sir Ken McCallum, who has been the Director General of MI5 since 2020, and warned that the UK needed to “defend itself robustly” against security threats
He said that Russia had carried out operations which were “routinely” being uncovered.
The concern must be that however many plots are ‘uncovered’, far more are not, because even The Eye is a victim of Russian hacking…
Truths like these by our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, who was gripped by the rare neurological condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now!
‘From Russia without love part two’ comes soon.
Tomorrow – during 23 years with the BBC, and in a 42 year journalistic career (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), for Phil it has always been vital to know the polling figures showing who is popular with the public, and who is not – and this is now highlighted by Andy Burnham becoming Prime Minister (PM) with the numbers apparently showing that Labour have gained a significant bounce from it.
