Increased aggression means there is a coordinated campaign directed at Moscow, a Foreign Ministry official says
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The amount of cyberattacks on Russian network resources has quadrupled over the past year, the deputy head of the department of international information security at the Foreign Ministry, Vladimir Shin, claims, stating that these attacks are being orchestrated by the US and its allies.
According to the official, who spoke at a meeting of the UN General Assembly First Committee on Tuesday, NATO does not even try to hide its efforts to develop cyber warfare methods, and conducts joint exercises with representatives from Ukraine, which is not a member of the bloc.
“The head of the US Cyber Command, Paul Nakasone, publicly acknowledges conducting offensive cyber operations against Russia, including, and above all, through the hands of the Ukrainian IT army created by the Americans,” the diplomat said, apparently referring to an interview Nakasone gave to Sky News earlier this year.
He added that the scale of this increased cyber aggression indicates that these attacks are part of a coordinated campaign directed at Moscow, which is being orchestrated by Western countries with the involvement of the “hacker community and private companies.”
In his address to the UN, Shin also accused the West of trying to distract the international community from its “unprecedented in scale” cyberattacks against Russia and other countries by leveling “unsubstantiated accusations” against Moscow that it is the aggressor. The diplomat stated, however, that there is ample documentary evidence proving that systemic cyber-aggression is being conducted by the special services of the US and its NATO allies.
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Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko reported to President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday that cyberattacks against the country have been growing both in number and scale. He stated that this year, Russian cyber security experts repelled around 25,000 attacks on Russian state resources, and 1,200 attacks on critical IT infrastructure.
It was also revealed last month by the Washington Post that the US had developed a network of fake social media accounts to conduct psychological and information warfare and spread pro-Western narratives. The Pentagon’s Centcom unit has allegedly deployed hundreds of accounts over the past five years, many of which were part of a recent propaganda blitz that “advanced anti-Russia narratives.”
At the same time, a separate investigation by researchers at the University of Adelaide in Australia found that of the 5.2 million tweets related to the military conflict between Russia and Ukraine published from February 23 to March 8, up to 80% were disseminated by fake accounts and 90% of them were pro-Ukrainian. They noted that the majority of the accounts were English-language, leading researchers to believe that the goal of these bots was to “drive more disruption in English-speaking countries” and “influence a variety of user groups.”
