Damaged Baltic Sea power cable Estlink 2 seen back in operation late June
STOCKHOLM, May 30 (Reuters) - Finnish power grid operator Fingrid said on Friday it expects the Estlink 2 subsea power cable between Finland and Estonia, which was damaged in December, to return to commercial use on June 25, slightly earlier than seen before.
Fingrid, which last month predicted the cable would be back in operation on July 15, said in a statement repair work was progressing faster than expected.
Finnish authorities in December seized a ship carrying Russian oil in the Baltic Sea on suspicion it caused the outage by dragging its anchor across the power cable as well as four internet lines.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
a day ago
- Daily Mail
Labour set to unveil ten-year plan to get Britain ready for war... but critics say the Government is not going far enough
Labour 's defence review plunged into disarray on Friday night in a row over how it will be funded. The Government's ten-year defence plan will be announced on Monday and promises to make Britain ready for war. But well-placed sources said key recommendations could be 'unaffordable' after an apparent row over whether a target of spending 3 per cent of GDP on defence will be reached. Ministers unveiled plans to build six munitions factories in the UK and produce 7,000 long-range weapons, including attack drones and precision missiles. The first factory will be up and running in the next few years, sources said, and all six sites will be ready in this Parliament. Some £1.5 billion will also be provided to build the factories. Ministers said the plans will create more than 1,000 new jobs. Defence Secretary John Healey said it was time for Britain to 'move to warfighting readiness to deter our adversaries' and that the measures he is announcing are a 'message to Moscow'. The new weapons will include drones that can fly across borders and launch an attack on Russia from Britain's base in Estonia, government sources said. They will also include long-range missiles such as Storm Shadows, and could feature hypersonic missiles that travel faster than the speed of sound. Writing in The Mail on Sunday, Mr Healey said the UK-built 7,000 weapons are aimed at 'deterring adversaries like Russia'. But critics warned that the Government was not going far or fast enough. Shadow defence secretary James Cartlidge said the review was a 'damp squib', adding: 'Labour have wasted almost a year on a Strategic Defence Review to conclude what we all knew last summer – we urgently have to order more munitions, given the threats we face and the need to replace the stockpiles we rightly provided to Ukraine. 'Far from acting at the pace and scale required, Labour have dithered and delayed. 'The fact is the Treasury has used the defence review to delay taking action, prioritising penny-pinching over rapid rearmament.' Labour was also forced to deny a split over defence funding at the heart of Cabinet. Mr Healey told The Times on Friday he had 'no doubt' that the 3 per cent of GDP target will be reached 'in the next Parliament'. But this comment was at odds with the official position – that the target will be hit 'when economic conditions allow'. A government source privately accused the Defence Secretary of veering off-script to try to bounce the Treasury into a firmer commitment for his department. But allies of Mr Healey said his comments reflected his 'vote of confidence in the Chancellor's economic performance'. A source said: 'He was expressing an opinion, which is that he has full confidence that the Government will be able to deliver on its ambition to spend 3 per cent of GDP on defence in the next parliament.' Defence sources say the arsenal of 7,000 long-range weapons will be a deterrent against a future attack by Russia. It is likely to include bunker-busting Storm Shadow missiles, which can travel at 600mph and use GPS tracking to hit targets precisely. Defence insiders also claim the UK will order scores of the so-called Future Cruise/Anti-Ship Weapon (FC/ASW), which is replacing Storm Shadow and can be fired from warships, submarines or the RAF's Typhoon warplanes. One variant of this missile, which has been developed with France and Italy, is understood to have a booster which allows it to hit four times the speed of sound. Meanwhile, in another announcement, The Mail on Sunday understands that British Army units based in Estonia will be equipped with hundreds of fearsome HX-2 kamikaze drones. The distinctive 'X-wing' drones have a range of more than 60 miles and would be used to destroy tanks and bunkers as well as attack enemy helicopters. They will be built by a German company called Helsing, which is expected to open a secret factory in the UK. It is understood the drones, which cost around £100,000 each and use artificial intelligence to evade air defences, will be eventually rolled out across the Army.
Telegraph
2 days ago
- Telegraph
No one is safe online – blame these depraved teenage hackers
In October 2020, tens of thousands of people across Finland received an email telling them that some of their most intimate secrets were about to be made public. A hacker had infiltrated the computer files of Vastaamo, Finland's largest commercial therapy provider, and was now blackmailing patients, including children, saying their therapy notes would be published online if they didn't pay a ransom of €500 each. The breach was so shocking that when the hacker, who went by the alias 'ransom_man', posted about the accomplishment on Ylilauta, a Finnish version of the notorious online forum 4chan, he was bombarded with messages from fellow users telling him that this time he'd gone too far. Ransom_man was used to making enemies. His real name was Julius Kivimӓki, and he also went by the aliases 'Zeekill', 'Ryan' and 'The Untouchable Hacker God'. He was a 23-year-old from Finland who, both individually and as part of cyber gangs, had been causing havoc online for companies and innocent people around the world since he was 13. In Joe Tidy's Ctrl+Alt+Chaos, an illuminating and often scary book about teenage hackers, Kivimӓki is cast as the talisman of various groups of young men – and they're almost exclusively men – who delighted in causing damage and cruelty on the internet in the 2010s, sometimes for money but mostly just because they could. The trope of teenage 'hackers in hoodies' sitting in their parents' homes and breaking into companies' online systems is now a little outdated. Businesses and organisations these days are more concerned about ransomware gangs and state-sanctioned hackers. Nonetheless, Tidy writes, from around 2010 to 2015, the world saw 'probably the most active period in history for youth cybercrime gangs' – and Kivimӓki was 'one of the chief architects'. Tidy, the BBC's first ever 'cyber correspondent', aims to use Kivimӓki's career to chronicle the rise of a 'sadistic' culture in which being an 'edgelord' – acting as provocatively and outrageously as possible – took precedence over anything else, including how many victims might be hurt, or how badly. The structure doesn't always work: Kivimӓki, who was sentenced in 2022 for the Vastaamo hack and is in prison until 2026, couldn't be interviewed by Tidy, meaning he remains a somewhat shadowy figure despite being the nominal centrepiece. But as an insight into how very young teenage boys can get lured into a world of cybercrime – and, crucially, seem not to care about the pain they're causing – it's fascinating. Until roughly the early 2000s, most amateur hacking groups cast themselves as ethical: they would, for instance, breach online systems to embarrass greedy corporations. But around 2010, Tidy says, something 'went horribly wrong'. Suddenly gangs weren't hacking for any particular reason beyond causing mischief and receiving their peers' recognition. 'If there was any strategy to our attacks,' one former teenage hacker recalls, 'it was mayhem.' Tidy puts much of the blame on Twitter, which 'gave birth to a new generation of fame-hungry hackers' who could boast about their work to win followers and clout. Groups such as Lulzsec, HTP (Hack the Planet), UG Nazi and Lizard Squad – with all of whom Kivimӓki had some involvement or connection – would engage in 'deliberately cruel' acts just to show how irreverent they were. Sometimes these hacks involved a level of sophistication: one group took down both the Xbox Live and PlayStation Network, used by a combined 158 million people, over Christmas 2014. But often the tactics were so simple as to not be considered hacking at all. Among cybersecurity criminals and experts, these young men were derided as 'script kiddies' – the lowest tier of hackers. One favoured technique of these teenagers, for example, particularly in America, was 'swatting': police would be contacted about a bogus 'emergency' at someone's home, so that an armed Swat team was sent to the victim's door. A particularly distressing case, related by Tidy, is that of a 17-year-old boy from Illinois named Blair Strater, who became the focus of Kivimaki's ire: on more than one occasion, armed police appeared in the night at Strater's and his parents' home. The email and social media accounts of Strater's mother were also hacked by Kivimӓki and HTP, who then wrote anti-Semitic and racist tirades under her name. The adult Straters' marriage fell apart, Strater's mother lost her job during the ordeal. At this point, some other teenage hackers begin to distance themselves from Kivimӓki. 'We started to realise the type of person he was. The way he treated Blair was wrong,' one former hacker recalls. Yet the Straters were comparatively lucky. Another incident led to an innocent father-of-two being shot dead on his doorstep by armed police. Meanwhile, another young wannabe hacker who mouthed off about Lizard Squad – with whom Kivimӓki was also involved – was forced to cut himself dozens of times along his forearm and take a picture of it while holding a card saying 'LizardSquad made me do it', in order to get his online accounts back. 'It was pure sadism,' one participant admits. When caught, because most of the perpetrators were under 18, they often received extremely light sentences. For some, this was enough to set them straight, but for others it just made them feel invincible. One former member recounts how 'making global headlines made him feel like a god'. Tidy does a good job of tracking down and talking to such ex-hackers. Unsurprisingly, what comes out is that, in many cases, these boys were extremely lonely, bullied at school or had a hard home life; they desperately wanted the camaraderie of friendship. Most had found their way into these gangs through obsessively playing computer games and coming across forums that listed cheat codes – then matters spiralled. The first parents knew about it was when the police appeared at their door. They'd thought their son was just playing computer games. While there was no hierarchy within these gangs, Tidy says they were usually led by whoever was most outrageous or most sophisticated at hacking. Kivimӓki sounds like he was a dangerous combination of both. When Finnish police raided his bedroom in 2013, he was just 16, but there was so much illegal activity on his computer that they had to limit their investigations to just the bigger cybercrimes. Antti Kurittu, a Finnish cybersecurity expert and former police detective, says that Kivimӓki hacked a therapy company simply because it would cause distress: 'I don't think he was ever interested in cybersecurity that much. He was just interested in causing mayhem to people's lives… he is uncaring to a degree which is difficult to understand.' The spate of 'edgelord' teenage hackers had appeared to have died away; but at the end of his book, Tidy mentions new groups such as Scattered Spider, who appear to be made up of teenage boys, some as young as 16, who work with notorious Russian ransomware groups and are willing to use offline violence as part of their threats. Scattered Spider is alleged to be linked to the recent hacks of Marks and Spencer, the Co-op and Harrods. Authorities believe that gangs will emerge in new digital spaces such as the metaverse, and that the best way to avoid that will be education: teaching children 'where the lines are' online. If we fail to do that, Tidy writes, we're 'enabling the cyber criminals of the future'.
The Independent
2 days ago
- The Independent
Sweden will step up insurance checks on foreign ships as worries about Russia rise
Sweden said Saturday it will step up insurance checks on foreign ships in a move aimed at tightening controls on Russia 's so-called "shadow fleet ' of aging ships. The government in Stockholm said that, starting July 1, the coast guard and the Swedish Maritime Administration will be tasked with collecting insurance information not just from ships that call at Swedish ports, but also those that pass through the country's territorial waters and exclusive economic zone. 'This underlines Sweden's clear presence in the Baltic Sea, which in itself has a deterrent effect,' Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said in a statement. 'It also provides Sweden and our allies with important information about vessels that can be used as a basis for sanctions listings of more vessels in the shadow fleet.' Russia uses its shadow fleet to transport oil and gas, or to carry stolen Ukrainian grain. The European Union has now targeted almost 350 of the ships in total in sanctions packages, most recently on May 20. Kristersson said that 'we are seeing more and more problematic events in the Baltic Sea and this requires us not only to hope for the best, but also to plan for the worst.' The average age of the vessels is around 18 years, meaning they're near the end of their lifespan and are more vulnerable to accidents, especially if they're not well-maintained.
