Russia keeps getting hacked

Oh, how the tables have turned.
By Christianna Silva  on 
Russian President Vladimir Putin during the Summit of Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) at the Grand Kremlin Palace.
Putin, thinking about the hacks, probably Credit: Contributor/Getty Images

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.

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, Reuters reported.

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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, according to Reuters.

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.

Topics Politics

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Christianna Silva
Senior Culture Reporter

Christianna Silva is a Senior Culture Reporter at Mashable. They write about tech and digital culture, with a focus on Facebook and Instagram. Before joining Mashable, they worked as an editor at NPR and MTV News, a reporter at Teen Vogue and VICE News, and as a stablehand at a mini-horse farm. You can follow them on Twitter @christianna_j.


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