A pro-Kremlin cybercriminal group has been attacking the official internet pages of banks and Spanish government agencies for the past two days, just days before the country’s parliamentary elections, the company VisionWare said Thursday.
The founder and executive chairman (CEO) of this Portuguese company specializing in cybersecurity, Bruno Castro, explained to the agency Lusa that the perpetrators of the attack, tracked down by the Visionware team that permanently monitors the so-called “dark web”, ” a very well-known group within cybercrime”.
Like other groups, in addition to “pure and hard cybercrime”, it also has ties to the Russian government and carries out “cyber warfare actions against pro-Ukrainian countries”, as happened in Spain over the past two days, with “massive attacks” on pages on the Internet about ” pillars of the democratic state”.
The attack targeted pages of ministries, the presidency of the government, the Constitutional Court, the Royal House, banks and even a defense equipment manufacturing company.
The targeted ‘sites’ are ‘taken down’ and quickly reactivated, due to the purpose of these attacksaccording to Bruno Castro, is to function as a kind of “pre-warning” or threat to institutions and administrations and not to disrupt the services or the functioning of society.
“They are harmless in terms of operations, they don’t interrupt power supply or banking, for example,” but they expose the vulnerabilities of “sites” and organisms that “should be very secure” and threaten that the groups have the capacity to attack them or carry out attacks of a different magnitude and more violent, VisionWare’s president explained.
Bruno Castro believes this course of action explains Spain’s lack of media coverage of Wednesday and Thursday’s attacks on institutional sites in the country.
This form of action is common in these pro-Kremlin cybercriminal groups and targets NATO countries (the defense alliance between European and North American countries), according to Bruno Castro, who drew attention to “the ideal timing”, from the point from the point of view of attackers, in this case Spain, which is holding early parliamentary elections next Sunday.
Spain has taken a “very pro-Ukrainian” stance, supplying combat equipment and other support, in addition to public statements of support for Kiev by Spanish leaders in the context of NATO, the representative recalled.
VisionWare is a global cybersecurity company and is a NATO accredited information security and cybersecurity solutions company.
The company, which has offices in Portugal and Cape Verde, is the oldest in Portugal in the field of cybersecurity.
Source: DN
