Cyber attacks on Russia by foreign ‘state structures’ on the rise

President Vladimir Putin has announced that Russia must bolster its cyber defences by reducing the use of foreign software and hardware.

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.

Putin stated 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, Reuters reported. There have been prolific data leaks since then, 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. According to Reuters, it even disconnected from the global internet during tests last summer, however, those tests haven’t been able to significantly mitigate impacts of the Western barrage of sanctions imposed over the past few months.

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The nation affirms it is ready for more attacks, 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 5:00am local time every day.