Russian “hackers” attacked Finnish institutions for supporting Kyiv

Russian hackers posing as NoName057 attacked several portals of Finnish institutions this Friday in retaliation for supporting Ukraine in the war against Russia, the group reported on its Telegram messaging channel.

According to a list published by the pirate group, computer attacks were aimed at the websites of the Finnish government, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Arbitration Institute and the Ministry of Defense image bank.

“We remind the Russophobic authorities of Finland of the cost of supporting the criminal regime in Kyiv, an agreement that they signed exactly a month ago,” they said.

At issue is a security agreement signed on April 3 between Finnish President Alexander Stubb and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Helsinki pledges to maintain political and military support for Kyiv for the next ten years.

The Helsingin Sanomat newspaper reported that the cyber attack led to the temporary suspension of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry website. This incident is being investigated in cooperation with Finnish authorities to try to confirm its authorship.

The Ministry of Defense confirmed the detection of some malicious traffic on its portal, which led to its slowdown, but without a complete failure.

The Russian hacker group NoName057, founded in 2022 after the outbreak of war in Ukraine, is one of the most active in carrying out cyber attacks against European institutions and bodies in European Union (EU) member states.

In Finland alone, a group attempted to bring down, among others, the IT systems of the government, Eduskunta (parliament), the Bank of Finland, the tax office, the electricity grid operator Fingrid and several municipalities.

He was also responsible for an attack on the websites of several Spanish institutions during the EU summit held last October in Granada, which was attended by major European leaders.

However, Russia this Friday found the German government’s accusations that a group of Russian hackers controlled by Moscow carried out a recent campaign of cyber attacks in Germany to be “unfounded”.

“[A Rússia] rejects accusations of the involvement of Russian government agencies in the case under consideration, and the activities of the APT 28 group in general, as unproven and unfounded,” the Charge d’Affaires of the Russian Embassy in Berlin posted on the Telegram social network.

This Friday, the German government summoned the charge d’affaires of the Russian embassy in Berlin after accusing Russian intelligence services of a computer attack.