Russia — a nation that has famously been on the offensive when it comes to cyber attacks — is now facing its own barrage of hacks as multiple sanctions hit the country from the West.
In a meeting with the Russian Security Council on Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the number of cyber attacks by foreign “state structures” had increased several times over, Reuters reported.
“Targeted attempts are being made to disable the internet resources of Russia’s critical information infrastructure,” Putin said during the meeting, Reuters reported. “Serious attacks have been launched against the official sites of government agencies. Attempts to illegally penetrate the corporate networks of leading Russian companies are much more frequent as well.”
Putin said the challenges came on the heels of Western suppliers having “unilaterally stopped technical support of their equipment in Russia” in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Since then, there have been data leaks abound, from Russia’s second-biggest bank to e-commerce sites.
Russia has been attempting for a long while to improve its own internet infrastructure so that something like this wouldn’t happen. Last summer, it even disconnected from the global internet during tests, Reuters reported. But those tests haven’t been able to significantly mitigate impacts of the Western barrage of sanctions imposed over the past few months.
The nation does say it’s ready for more attacks, though, despite being caught off guard by multiple attacks already. The state-owned news agency, TASS, reported that Putin called the anti-Russia sanctions failures.
“Already today we can say that cyber aggression against us, as well as in general the sanctions attack on Russia, have failed,” Putin said, despite hacks against the state that some might consider successes.
This comes as Ukraine continues to disrupt Russian targets including online payment services, government departments, aviation companies, and food delivery firms. According to Wired, Ukraine has an IT Army that attacks a new list of Russian targets around 5 a.m. local time every day.
