How conflicts affect cyber security

Russia is receiving a large number of cyber-attacks. As reported by the state news agency TASS and picked up by Reuters, Putin's government-held websites are experiencing a wave of cyber-attacks that the country had never seen before. If previously their (cyber-attack) power at peak times reached 500 gigabytes, now it is at 1 terabyte, said the country's Ministry of Digital Affairs. That is two to three times more than the most serious incidents of this type that had ever been reported before.

According to ABC, the Kremlin is currently trying to filter traffic coming from abroad in order to minimise the number of incidents.

For his part, José Rosell, director of the cybersecurity company S2 Grupo, points out that there are currently many false flag attacks, so it is not even possible to know for certain which specific groups are carrying out the attacks that Russia is experiencing.

On the one hand, Anonymous. The motley crew of 'hacktivists' has been behind attacks against several Russian media outlets, such as 'Russia 24' and 'Channel One'. It has also managed to affect the services of streaming platforms such as Wink, according to what it has shared on social networks, and to steal data from Roskomnadzor, the federal service in charge of telecommunications in Russia.

Faced with all these attacks, the acting Minister of Development, Juan Carlos Suárez-Quiñones, has informed that the Junta de Castilla y León has taken specific measures such as "changing passwords" to protect itself against a possible cyber-attack on critical infrastructure in the context of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

This is what Suárez-Quiñones explained when asked about this issue during a press conference at the Castilla y León Supercomputing Centre based in the capital of León.

"It is not that we are waiting for it to happen, but that we are preparing ourselves in case it does," he explained.

For his part, the general director of the Castilla y León Supercomputing Foundation (SCAYLE), Vicente Matellán, recalled that "the cyberwar has not started now" and insisted that Scayle's infrastructures "continuously detect attacks" in an ordinary cyber world that is "very dangerous".

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