Cyberwarfare by Russia

Background

Russian military doctrine includes cyber operations and influence campaigns under the concept of "information confrontation" (). According to a 2017 United States Defense Intelligence Agency assessment, this strategy has two main components:

• Informational-technical operations, focused on computer network operations including defense, exploitation, and offensive attacks
• Informational-psychological operations, aimed at influencing beliefs and behaviors to advance Russian state goals

Investigative journalists have revealed how this strategy builds on Soviet-era KGB structures, with Russian intelligence agencies playing central roles. The agencies employ surveillance tools like the SORM system to monitor and suppress online dissent.

Russia formalized this approach in its 2016 Information Security Doctrine, providing a national security framework linking internal control, external influence, and technological development. The doctrine defines information security broadly, encompassing data, infrastructure, and human processes. It establishes goals to protect information sovereignty, secure critical systems and state secrets, safeguard constitutional rights and public order online, and promote domestic technology. The doctrine identifies foreign states, organizations, and individuals as potential threats, directing all government branches to coordinate responses.

Russian military discussions place information operations within broader debates about modern warfare. In 2013, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov argued that non-military tools can be decisive when coordinated with limited force, advocating better integration of military and state resources. While his article is frequently cited in Western analysis, experts caution against viewing it as formal doctrine. Both Russian and Western analysts emphasize that it reflects long-standing Russian military thinking rather than a new approach.

The implementation involves multiple security agencies with overlapping domestic and foreign responsibilities. The Federal Security Service manages internal security, counterintelligence, and information security, including surveillance systems. Military intelligence conducts external operations including cyber intrusion and disruption. Civil agencies and state-aligned media support messaging campaigns domestically and internationally.

Researchers at the Centre for Eastern Studies and Kennan Institute emphasize how Russia combines legal, technical and narrative tools. Domestic internet controls enable censorship, surveillance, and pressure on intermediaries, supporting psychological operations. Foreign operations synchronize influence activities with espionage and disruptive attacks. While some label this hybrid or non-linear warfare, analysts caution that these terms can obscure the continuity in Russian strategy, which relies on coordinated state action rather than novel doctrine.

Online presence

US journalist Pete Earley described his interviews with former senior Russian intelligence officer Sergei Tretyakov, who defected to the United States in 2000: Tretyakov did not specify the targeted web sites, but made clear they selected the sites which are most convenient for distributing the specific information. According to him, during his work in New York City in the end of the 1990s, one of the most frequent subjects was the War in Chechnya.

According to a publication in Russian computer weekly Computerra, "just because it became known that anonymous editors are editing articles in English Wikipedia in the interests of UK and US intelligence and security services, it is also likely that Russian security services are involved in editing Russian Wikipedia, but this is not even interesting to prove it — because everyone knows that security bodies have a special place in the structure of our [Russian] state."

Organization and attribution

According to US Department of Justice indictments, cybersecurity company reports, and investigative journalism, several recurring Russian state-linked hacking groups have been identified. APT28 (also known as Fancy Bear) is commonly linked to GRU Unit 26165 and conducts operations against parliaments, broadcasters and election campaigns in Europe. APT29 (also known as Nobelium or Midnight Blizzard) is linked to Russia's SVR and conducts long-running espionage campaigns targeting governments and technology firms. Sandworm, assessed as GRU Unit 74455, has deployed destructive malware against Ukrainian targets and carried out global campaigns like NotPetya. Turla, tracked by Microsoft as Secret Blizzard and associated with FSB infrastructure, continues espionage operations including 2025 activity targeting foreign embassies in Moscow. The FSB-linked Star Blizzard group (also known as Callisto or ColdRiver) has faced sanctions, criminal charges and technical takedowns for spear-phishing campaigns targeting officials, academics and NGOs.

While attribution remains contested in some incidents, multiple governments have issued formal statements attributing responsibility to Russian state entities based on classified intelligence and technical evidence.

Cyberattacks

It has been claimed that Russian security services organized a number of denial of service attacks as a part of their cyber-warfare against other countries, such as the 2007 cyberattacks on Estonia and the 2008 cyberattacks on Russia, South Ossetia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. One identified young Russian hacker said that he was paid by Russian state security services to lead hacking attacks on NATO computers. He was studying computer sciences at the Department of the Defense of Information. His tuition was paid for by the FSB.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 saw renewed interest in information warfare, with the widespread dissemination of propaganda and misinformation on social media, by way of a large-scale Russian propaganda campaign on social media, especially in countries that abstained from voting on the United Nations Resolution ES-11/1 such as India, South Africa, and Pakistan. Bots played a disproportionate role in the dissemination of pro-Russian messages and amplified its proliferation in early-stage diffusion, especially on platforms like Twitter, where pro-Russian messages received ~251,000 retweets and thereby reached around 14.4 million users. Of these "spreaders", around 20.28% of the spreaders are classified as bots, most of which were created at the beginning of the invasion.

Europe

Main article: Russian interference in European politics

In 2023, authorities in the Czech Republic exposed a Kremlin-funded influence operation called Voice of Europe based in Prague and led by pro-Russian figures, including Ukrainian politician Viktor Medvedchuk. The outlet was part of a covert network aiming to sway European politics by channeling funds to far-right and Eurosceptic politicians while amplifying pro-Kremlin narratives. Investigations by Czech intelligence in 2024 revealed that this Russian-financed network attempted to bribe European lawmakers and influence elections (including the 2024 European Parliament election), using local intermediaries to promote Kremlin positions. The exposure of the Voice of Europe operation highlighted a broader pattern of Russian cyber-enabled interference across European Union member states, combining traditional hacking with financial subversion and disinformation campaigns to undermine European unity.

Estonia

Main article: 2007 cyberattacks on Estonia

In April 2007, following a diplomatic row with Russia over a Soviet war memorial, Estonia was targeted by a series of cyberattacks on financial, media, and government websites which were taken down by an enormous volume of spam being transmitted by botnets in what is called a distributed denial-of-service attack. Online banking was made inaccessible, government employees were suddenly unable to communicate via e-mail, and media outlets could not distribute news. The attacks reportedly came from Russian IP addresses, online instructions were in Russian, and Estonian officials traced the systems controlling the cyberattacks back to Russia. However, some experts held doubts that the attacks were carried out by the Russian government itself. A year after the attack NATO founded the Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in Tallinn as a direct consequence of the attacks.

In response to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Estonia has removed a Soviet-era tank monument near Narva. After its removal, Estonia was subject to "the most extensive cyberattack" since the 2007 cyberattacks.

France

In 2015, the Paris-based French broadcasting service TV5Monde was attacked by hackers who used malicious software to attack and destroy the network's systems and take all twelve of its channels off the air. The attack was initially claimed by a group calling themselves the "Cyber Caliphate" however a more in-depth investigation by French authorities revealed the attack on the network had links to APT28, a GRU-affiliated hacker group. In May 2017, on the eve of the French presidential election, more than 20,000 e-mails belonging to the campaign of Emmanuel Macron were dumped on an anonymous file-sharing website, shortly after the campaign announced they had been hacked. Word of the leak spread rapidly through the Internet, facilitated by bots and spam accounts. An analysis by Flashpoint, an American cybersecurity firm, determined with "moderate confidence" that APT28 was the group behind the hacking and subsequent leak.

In February 2021 the Agence nationale de la sécurité des systèmes d'information said that "several French entities" were breached by Sandworm between late 2017 and 2020 by hacking French software company Centreon to deploy malware. Similar to the 2020 United States federal government data breach. The ANSSI said the breach "mostly affected information technology providers, especially web hosting providers". Russia has denied being behind the cyberattack. Centreon said in a statement that it "has taken note of the information" but disputed that the breach was linked to a vulnerability in their commercial software.

Germany

Main article: Russian sabotage operations in Europe

In 2015, a high-ranking security official stated that it was "highly plausible" that a cybertheft of files from the German Parliamentary Committee investigating the NSA spying scandal, later published by WikiLeaks, was conducted by Russian hackers. In late 2016, Bruno Kahl, president of the Bundesnachrichtendienst warned of data breaches and misinformation-campaigns steered by Russia. According to Kahl, there are insights that cyberattacks occur with no other purpose than to create political uncertainty. Süddeutsche Zeitung reported in February 2017 that a year-long probe by German intelligence "found no concrete proof of [Russian] disinformation campaigns targeting the government". By 2020 however German investigators had collected enough evidence to identify one suspect.

Hans-Georg Maaßen, head of the country's Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution from 2012 until 2018, noted "growing evidence of attempts to influence the [next] federal election" in September 2017 and "increasingly aggressive cyber espionage" against political entities in Germany. The New York Times reported on 21 September 2017, three days before the German federal election, that there was little to suggest any Russian interference in the election. In 2021 the European Commission has accused Russia of trying to interfere in European democratic processes just days before the parliamentary election on September 26 in Germany.

Poland

A three-year pro-Russian disinformation campaign on Facebook with an audience of 4.5 million Poles was discovered in early 2019 by OKO.press and Avaaz. The campaign published fake news and supported three Polish politicians and their websites: Adam Andruszkiewicz, former leader of the ultra-nationalist and neo-fascist All-Polish Youth and, , Secretary of State in the Polish Ministry of Digitisation; Janusz Korwin-Mikke; and Leszek Miller, an active member of the Polish United Workers' Party during the communist epoch and a prime minister of Poland during the post-communist epoch. Facebook responded to the analysis by removing some of the web pages.

Romania

Main article: 2022 cyberattacks on Romania, Accusations of Russian interference in the 2024 Romanian presidential election

Between late April and early May 2022, in the midst of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, multiple Romanian government, military, bank and mass media websites were taken down after a series of DDoS attacks, behind which was a pro-Kremlin hacking group, Killnet. The hacking group described the cyberattacks to be a response to a statement made by then-Senate president, Florin Cîțu that Romania would provide Ukraine with military equipment.

Georgia

On 20 July 2008, the website of the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, was rendered inoperable for twenty-four hours by a series of denial of service attacks. Shortly after, the website of the National Bank of Georgia and the parliament were attacked by hackers who plastered images of Mikheil Saakashvili and former Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. During the war, many Georgian government servers were attacked and brought down, reportedly hindering communication and the dissemination of crucial information. According to technical experts, this is the first recorded instance in history of cyberattacks coinciding with an armed conflict.

An independent US-based research institute US Cyber Consequences Unit report stated the attacks had "little or no direct involvement from the Russian government or military". According to the institute's conclusions, some several attacks originated from the PCs of multiple users located in Russia, Ukraine and Latvia. These users were willingly participating in cyberwarfare, being supporters of Russia during the 2008 South Ossetia war, while some other attacks also used botnets.

Kyrgyzstan

Beginning in mid-January 2009, Kyrgyzstan's two main ISPs came under a large-scale DDoS attack, shutting down websites and e-mail within the country, effectively taking the nation offline. The attacks came at a time when the country's president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, was being pressured by both domestic actors and Russia to close a U.S. air base in Kyrgyzstan. The Wall Street Journal reported the attacks had been carried out by a Russian "cyber-militia".

South Korea

According to two United States intelligence officials that talked to The Washington Post, and also the findings of cybersecurity analyst Michael Matonis, Russia is likely behind the cyberattacks against the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea. The worm responsible for these cyberattacks is known as "Olympic Destroyer".

The worm targeted all Olympic IT infrastructure, and succeeded in taking down WiFi, feeds to jumbotrons, ticketing systems, and other Olympic systems. It was timed to go off at the start of the opening ceremonies. It was unique in that the hackers attempted to use many false signatures to blame other countries such as North Korea and China.

Ukraine

Main article: Russo-Ukrainian cyberwarfare

In March 2014, a Russian cyber weapon called Snake or "Ouroboros" was reported to have created havoc on Ukrainian government systems. The Snake tool kit began spreading into Ukrainian computer systems in 2010. It performed Computer Network Exploitation (CNE), as well as highly sophisticated Computer Network Attacks (CNA).

From 2014 to 2016, according to CrowdStrike, the Russian APT Fancy Bear used Android malware to target the Ukrainian Army's Rocket Forces and Artillery. They distributed an infected version of an Android app whose original purpose was to control targeting data for the D-30 Howitzer artillery. The app, used by Ukrainian officers, was loaded with the X-Agent spyware and posted online on military forums. CrowdStrike claims the attack was successful, with more than 80% of Ukrainian D-30 Howitzers destroyed, the highest percentage loss of any artillery pieces in the army (a percentage that had never been previously reported and would mean the loss of nearly the entire arsenal of the biggest artillery piece of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.). According to the Ukrainian army, this number is incorrect and that losses in artillery weapons "were way below those reported" and that these losses "have nothing to do with the stated cause".

The U.S. government concluded after a study that a cyberattack caused a power outage in Ukraine which left more than 200,000 people temporarily without power. The Russian hacking group Sandworm or the Russian government were possibly behind the malware attack on the Ukrainian power grid as well as a mining company and a large railway operator in December 2015. A similar attack occurred in December 2016.

In February 2021 Ukraine accused Russia of attacking the System of Electronic Interaction of Executive Bodies a web portal used by the Ukrainian government to circulate documents by uploaded documents that contained macroscripts which if downloaded and enabled would lead to the computer to secretly download malware that would allow hackers to take over a computer.

In January 2022, a cyberattack on Ukraine took down the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other government agencies.

In February 2022, before and after Russian troops entered eastern Ukraine amid an environment of escalating tensions between Ukraine and Russia, several major Ukrainian governmental and business websites were taken down by a series of cyberattacks. U.S. officials attributed the attacks to Russian attackers, although the Russian government denied involvement.

2014 Ukrainian presidential election

Pro-Russian hackers launched a series of cyberattacks over several days to disrupt the May 2014 Ukrainian presidential election, releasing hacked emails, attempting to alter vote tallies, and delaying the final result with distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks. Malware that would have displayed a graphic declaring far-right candidate Dmytro Yarosh the electoral winner was removed from Ukraine's Central Election Commission less than an hour before polls closed. Despite this, Channel One Russia "reported that Mr. Yarosh had won and broadcast the fake graphic, citing the election commission's website, even though it had never appeared there." According to Peter Ordeshook: "These faked results were geared for a specific audience in order to feed the Russian narrative that has claimed from the start that ultra-nationalists and Nazis were behind the revolution in Ukraine."

United Kingdom

Main article: Russian interference in British politics

Brexit referendum

Main article: Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum

In the run up to the 2016 referendum on the United Kingdom exiting the European Union ("Brexit"), Prime Minister David Cameron suggested that Russia "might be happy" with a positive Brexit vote, while the Remain campaign accused the Kremlin of secretly backing a positive Brexit vote. In December 2016, Ben Bradshaw MP claimed in Parliament that Russia had interfered in the Brexit referendum campaign. In February 2017, Bradshaw called on the British intelligence service, Government Communications Headquarters, then under Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary, to reveal the information it had on Russian interference. In April 2017, the House of Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Select Committee issued a report stating, in regard to the June 2016 collapse of the government's voter registration website less than two hours prior to the originally scheduled registration deadline (which was then extended), that "the crash had indications of being a DDOS 'attack.'" The report also stated that there was "no direct evidence" supporting "these allegations about foreign interference". A Cabinet Office spokeswoman responded to the report: "We have been very clear about the cause of the website outage in June 2016. It was due to a spike in users just before the registration deadline. There is no evidence to suggest malign intervention."

In June 2017, it was reported by The Guardian that "Leave" campaigner Nigel Farage was a "person of interest" in the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation into Russian interference in the United States 2016 Presidential election. In October 2017, Members of Parliament in the Culture, Media and Sport Committee demanded that Facebook, Twitter, Google and other social media corporations, to disclose all adverts and details of payments by Russia in the Brexit campaign.

In December 2023 the UK and its allies have accused Russia of a sustained cyberattacks dating back at least from 2015 until 2023. These attacks have included targeting parliamentarians from various political parties as well as universities, journalists and NGOs. The Star Blizzard group has been named as the group behind the attack is also thought to be subordinate to the Russian government.

United States

Early Attacks (1996-2008)

In 1999, Moonlight Maze was the US investigation of a 1996-1999 Russian cyberattack against NASA, the Pentagon, the US military, civilian academics and government agencies. The cyberattack was attributed to Russian-state-sponsored hackers.

The 2008 cyberattack on the United States was connected to Russian language threat actors.

White House and State Department Attacks (2015)

In April 2015, CNN reported that "Russian hackers" had "penetrated sensitive parts of the White House" computers in "recent months". It was said that the FBI, the Secret Service, and other U.S. intelligence agencies categorized the attacks as "among the most sophisticated attacks ever launched against U.S. government systems."

In 2015, CNN reported that Russian hackers, likely working for the Russian government, are suspected in the State Department hack. Federal law enforcement, intelligence and congressional officials briefed on the investigation say the hack of the State Department email system is the "worst ever" cyberattack intrusion against a federal agency.

2016 Election Interference

In February 2016, senior Kremlin advisor and top Russian cyber official Andrey Krutskikh told the Russian national security conference in Moscow that Russia was working on new strategies for the "information arena" that was equivalent to testing a nuclear bomb and would "allow us to talk to the Americans as equals".

In 2016, the release of hacked emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee, John Podesta, and Colin Powell, among others, through DCLeaks and WikiLeaks was said by private sector analysts and US intelligence services to have been of Russian origin. Also, in December 2016, Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Committee on Armed Services called for "a special select committee to investigate Russian attempts to influence the presidential election".

Infrastructure Attacks (2018-2021)

In 2018, the United States Computer Emergency Response Team released an alert warning that the Russian government was executing "a multi-stage intrusion campaign by Russian government cyber actors who targeted small commercial facilities' networks where they staged malware, conducted spear phishing, and gained remote access into energy sector networks." It further noted that "[a]fter obtaining access, the Russian government cyber actors conducted network reconnaissance, moved laterally, and collected information pertaining to Industrial Control Systems." The hacks targeted at least a dozen U.S. power plants, in addition to water processing, aviation, and government facilities.

In June 2019, the New York Times reported that hackers from the United States Cyber Command planted malware potentially capable of disrupting the Russian electrical grid. According to Wired senior writer Andy Greenberg, "The Kremlin warned that the intrusions could escalate into a cyberwar between the two countries."

Over several months in 2020, a group known as APT29 or Cozy Bear, working for Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, breached a top cybersecurity firm and multiple U.S. government agencies including the Treasury, Commerce, and Energy departments and the National Nuclear Security Administration. The hacks occurred through a network management system called SolarWinds Orion. The U.S. government had an emergency meeting on 12 December 2020, and the press reported the hack the next day. When Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service performs such hacks, it is typically "for traditional espionage purposes, stealing information that might help the Kremlin understand the plans and motives of politicians and policymakers," according to The Washington Post, and not for the purpose of leaking information to the public.

In February 2021 a report by Dragos stated that Sandworm has been targeting US electric utilities, oil and gas, and other industrial firms since at least 2017 and were successful in breaching these firms a "handful" of times.

In May 2021, the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack was perpetrated by Russian language hacking group DarkSide. It was the largest cyberattack on an energy infrastructure target in US history. Colonial Pipeline temporarily halted the operations of the pipeline due to the ransomware attack. The Department of Justice recovered the bitcoin ransom from the hackers.

Recent attacks (2023-2025)

Revealed in 2023, British authorities believed that Star Blizzard engaged in a cyberespionage campaign beginning in at least 2015 against U.K. lawmakers over several years. In December 2023, U.S. authorities charged two Russian men, who are believed to be located in Russia and were associated with the "Callisto Group," which is associated with "Cold River" and "Dancing Salome" and are managed by the FSB Information Security Center (18th Center) (CIB or TsIB FSB), in connection with ''Star Blizzard'''s previous actions, which included targeting individuals and groups throughout the United States, Europe and in other NATO countries, many of which were supporting Ukraine during the Russo-Ukrainian War and allegedly attempting to provide foreign malign influence campaigns to influence the United Kingdom's 2019 elections in support of Russian government interests. In December 2023, United States authorities charged Andrey Korinets, and the alleged FSB officer Ruslan Peretyatko, who both are members of the "Callisto Group" and were associated with spear-phishing schemes, with conspiracy to commit computer fraud: both individuals were sanctioned by the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States with the United States State Department offering a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to their whereabouts and arrest, as well as the arrest of their accomplices.

In 2024, two members of the Cyber Army Russia Reborn, Yuliya Vladimirovna Pankratova, also known as YUliYA, and Olegovich Degtyarenko were sanctioned, by the U.S. Department of the Treasury for hacking water facilities in both the US and Poland, as well as disrupt operations at a facility in France. Also, the group hacked "the industrial control systems (ICSes) that control water storage tanks in Texas". In early May 2024, Degtyarenko wrote training materials on how to compromise SCADA systems.

In October 2024, the United States Justice Department and Microsoft seized more than a hundred internet domains some of which were associated with the FSB supported hacker Star Blizzard or "Callisto Group," which is also known as "Cold River" and "Dancing Salome" and are managed by the FSB Information Security Center (18th Center) (CIB or TsIB FSB) (), and which were used as "criminal proxies" and used spear-phishing schemes to target Russians living in the United States, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), think tanks, and journalists according to Microsoft and United States State Department, Department of Energy, and Department of Defense officials, United States defense contractors, and former employees of the United States intelligence community according to the FBI. In some cases, the hackers were successful in obtaining information relating to nuclear energy-related research, United States foreign affairs and United States defense. According to Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit from January 2023 to August 2024, Star Blizzard targeted more than 30 different groups and at least 82 Microsoft customers which is "a rate of approximately one attack per week." Both the NGO-Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which is a nonprofit tech organization, and Microsoft, which had been tracking Star Blizzard since 2017, provided support during the investigations of Star Blizzard.

False alarms

On 30 December 2016, Burlington Electric Department, a Vermont utility company, announced that code associated with the Russian hacking operation dubbed Grizzly Steppe had been found in their computers. Officials from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence warned executives of the financial, utility and transportation industries about the malware code. The first report by The Washington Post left the impression that the grid had been penetrated, but the hacked computer was not attached to the grid. A later version attached this disclaimer to the top of its report correcting that impression: "Editor's Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Russian hackers had penetrated the U.S. electric grid. Authorities say there is no indication of that so far. The computer at Burlington Electric that was hacked was not attached to the grid."

Venezuela

After the news website Runrun.es published a report on extrajudicial killings by the Bolivarian National Police, on 25 May 2019, the Venezuelan chapter of the Instituto de Prensa y Sociedad (IPYS), pointed out that the website was out of service due to an uncached request attack, denouncing that it originated from Russia.

Notes

References

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