According to two interviews by two experts, one Russian and the other Ukrainian, to Sky News Arabia, each party accuses the other of targeting it, and responding to it with similar cyber attacks is nothing but self-defense.
What is the size of these cyber attacks, what institutions are targeted, and how far will they reach?
A harsher war
“Russia uses all its weapons and piracy is the most prominent of them, according to Naumkin Purvat, a specialist in international politics at the Ukrainian Tavrysky University, explaining that Moscow has used this weapon since the beginning of its special military operation in Ukraine to implement two goals:
- The first is military, which is the penetration of navigation systems and others on the battlefield.
- The second is financial, with the aim of financing the profits of piracy operations for stealing accounts or ransoms for its war in Kyiv.
According to the latest analysis of international piracy, 74 percent of the ransom money obtained through some cyberattacks in 2021 was harvested by Russian-linked hackers, and more than $400 million in cryptocurrency money was taken by groups likely to be affiliated with Russia, according to the report. Borvat.
He adds that, hours before the war, Moscow launched a cyberattack on his country using malicious software called FoxBlade, to completely erase data on government networks and control data.
However, he believes that Moscow has failed to penetrate Kyiv during its ongoing cyberattack; As a result of moving many of the most important systems inside Ukraine to servers outside it that are strongly secured; To prevent the disclosure of secrets and statements of political and military leaders and parliaments.
Despite the Ukrainian move to fend off cyberattacks, the “Rahdit” hackers, which means “evil Russian hackers”, had published the data of Ukrainian intelligence officers weeks after the start of the war in February 2022.
The West responds with sanctions
A few days ago, Washington and London targeted 7 members of a hacking group, some of whom are linked to the Russian intelligence service, according to US accusations, with a package of sanctions.
The sanctions include freezing any assets of Russian targets in the United States and Britain, as well as preventing citizens and entities from doing business with them.
The US Treasury justified the move by using the Russian group, the “Trickbot” network, for malicious software, and that it started its activity from Moscow nearly 9 years ago, by launching electronic attacks on companies using the so-called “Trojan horse” viruses.
Targeting Russian institutions
In that corner, the Russian military expert, Shatilov Minikaev, says that the current conflict is the first large-scale battle in which electronic weapons are used between Moscow on the one hand and the West and Washington on the other, explaining that the recent sanctions carry double standards.
Minikaev added that the West has contributed significantly to piracy attempts against Moscow over the past years in general and the past months in particular, as follows:
- • Disable internet connection throughout Russia, and turn off the electric power.
- • Influencing railway control tools.
- • Targeting vital information infrastructure, to spread misleading material in the Russian information space, and to tarnish Moscow’s image.
- • The websites of the Kremlin, Aeroflot, Sberbank, and others experienced temporary outages or problems due to the cyber attack.
- The Russian National Coordination Center for Computer Incidents also warned of an increase in hacker attacks on Russian information resources.
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