Latest news with #cyberwarfare
Wall Street Journal
20-07-2025
- Business
- Wall Street Journal
Predatory Sparrow Hacks Iran's Financial System
The 12-day war between Israel and Iran featured an unprecedented cyber campaign against the Islamic Republic's financial system. Previous state-sponsored hacks aimed to steal data, ransom assets or disrupt operations. Israel did something far more radical: It destroyed digital assets and banking records to undermine the regime. Israel's success offers the Trump administration new tools for confronting the Iranian threat. Israel first struck Bank Sepah, Iran's oldest and largest state-owned bank. The central financial institution of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Bank Sepah serves Iran's military and security forces, processing everything from salaries and pensions to sanctions-evading missile funds. Predatory Sparrow, a hacker group linked to the Israeli government, claimed credit for erasing Bank Sepah's banking data and rendering its systems inoperable. Automated teller machines went dark, and online and in-branch services shut down. Salary and pension payments halted.
Telegraph
19-07-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Putin's spies have infiltrated every section of British society
The Foreign Office's exposure and sanctioning of Russian individuals and organisations working against the UK demonstrates that we are a prime focus for Putin's political warfare, which is the use of all means other than armed conflict to achieve the state's objectives. Russia's targets are worldwide, but it is obvious that Britain is a priority given our leading role in supporting Ukraine. Indeed, some have suggested that the UK is the number one target behind Ukraine, even above the US, as Putin still hopes to lure Trump away from giving his full backing to Kyiv. Russian objectives include directly disrupting military aid to Ukraine as well as sowing division at home and inflicting greater costs on us through sabotage and cyber warfare. There have been repeated attacks in Britain and across Europe against infrastructure and transport hubs involved in shipping aid to Ukraine. A warehouse fire in London and an incendiary attack against a DHL hub in Birmingham are both likely to be the work of agents of the GRU, the Russian military intelligence service. Cyber attacks have targeted media outlets, telecoms providers, political institutions, government bodies and energy infrastructure in the UK. The Ministry of Defence has repelled 90,000 cyber attacks from hostile states in the last two years. Many originated in Russia, usually via proxies. Espionage and disinformation are also critical elements of Russian political warfare. Earlier this year a group of six Bulgarians living in the UK was convicted of spying across Europe on behalf of Russia, and Moscow devotes immense resources into bot farms attempting to inject its anti-Ukraine narrative into social media sites. Beyond sabotage, cyberwar and disinformation, Moscow's political warfare operations include direct threats to life. Since Putin came to power there have been at least six assassinations or attempted assassinations in the UK that were likely the work of the GRU. Three of the GRU units the Foreign Office has sanctioned have been implicated in the failed murder of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2018. The cyber components of two of these units were involved in targeting Skripal and then sought to disrupt UK and international investigations into the events. The third unit, known as 26165, was directly responsible for the attempt on Skripal's life. The same unit, in March 2022, conducted online reconnaissance on civilian shelters in Mariupol and Kharkiv, lining up artillery strikes which killed non-combatants sheltering there. Despite its current emphasis on undermining Ukraine and its allies, Russia's political warfare campaign goes much further, encompassing all areas of its national interests, including economic development, fostering allies and destabilising the West. A few years ago the head of Nato confirmed Russia had infiltrated environmental movements in Europe to maintain dependence on imported Russian gas. Since the start of the Gaza conflict in 2023, Russia has used armies of fake social media profiles to disproportionately amplify Pro-Palestinian voices in the UK to promote public discord and influence government decision-making. 'The Kremlin should be in no doubt,' according to David Lammy, 'we see what they are trying to do in the shadows and we won't tolerate it. That's why we're taking decisive action with sanctions against Russian spies'. He is right to impose these sanctions, but even assuming many of our allies follow suit, they will have little impact. Nor will the detailed exposure of Moscow's political warfare apparatus and some of its key players deter them. On the contrary, their activity will increase and become more sophisticated, especially with the development of artificial intelligence. In this situation, we need to constantly improve our defences, both in cyber security and intelligence. There are opportunity costs to that though. A few months ago the head of MI5, Ken McCallum, admitted he had been forced to 'pare back' on counterterrorism to deal with the growing threat posed by Russia and other hostile states. And don't for one moment think that Putin is not exploiting the waves of small boat Channel crossings that are filling our country with people we know nothing about. But defence is not enough: we must also fight fire with fire. The GRU, as well as the other Kremlin organs involved in attacking us have to be made to pay a price well beyond this sanctions regime. That means our own offensive political warfare campaign against Russia. Here, the Foreign Office sounds a hopeful note, claiming to be countering Russian attacks both publicly and 'behind the scenes'. But do we have the capability, the legal freedom and the political will to inflict the damage that is required?
Bloomberg
18-07-2025
- Politics
- Bloomberg
UK Sanctions Russian Spies Over Cyber Warfare Operations
The UK government sanctioned 18 people it named as spies from Russia's GRU military intelligence agency who it said were responsible for conducting cyber and hybrid warfare operations against Britain and Ukraine. One of the sanctioned GRU units carried out online reconnaissance to help target missile strikes against Mariupol in Ukraine, enabling a 2022 attack that destroyed a theater in the city killing hundreds of civilians, the Foreign Office said in a statement.
New York Times
10-07-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
A Reporter's Trail From a Bush-Era Cyberattack to Trump's Strike on Iran
Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together. Sixteen years before President Trump sent B-2 bombers armed with 30,000-pound bunker-busting weapons to blast into Fordo and Natanz, Iran's two major uranium enrichment centers, there was another American and Israeli assault with the same goal: Destroy Tehran's ability to produce nuclear fuel. But that attack, which started at the end of the Bush administration and spilled into the Obama era, wasn't the subject of wall-to-wall news coverage, or of public fears about triggering another war in the Middle East. It was a covert program, launched from the White House Situation Room where the two presidents reviewed diagrams of the enrichment site at Natanz and weighed the risks of releasing a sophisticated cyberweapon to speed up and slow down the centrifuges spinning deep underground, sending them out of control. The cyberweapon was given a name, Stuxnet, and the operation had a code name inside America's intelligence agencies: Olympic Games. It was designed as an alternative to blowing up the enrichment operations the old-fashioned way and risking a war. For years, it looked like a success — until the code was inadvertently made public and the Iranians, angry about the sabotage, began enriching uranium on a scale that was bigger than ever before. Uncovering the details, from President Bush's first orders to the days the code broke loose, plunged The New York Times into 15 years of even deeper reporting on Iran's nuclear infrastructure. Ultimately, it helped position The Times to cover the military gamble that President Trump took last month and its aftermath. The United States has never formally acknowledged Olympic Games; even today, most of the participants are barred from talking about it. But through our reporting from 2010 to 2012, readers learned details of the operation. And those revelations triggered new waves of coverage, as well as arguments over how long, and how effectively, Stuxnet had set the Iranians back. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Wall Street Journal
04-07-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
The Islamic Republic Won't Collapse Overnight
Your editorial 'After the 'Cease-Fire,' Tests for Iran' (June 25) notes the consequences of a pause gone wrong. If it is a way for President Trump to hamstring Israel, 'it will give Iran time to rebuild and retool for the next round of war.' Tehran's nuclear program may simply be pushed further underground. This underscores why Israel's shadow war against the Islamic Republic must continue and intensify. For three decades, Israel used sabotage, cyberwarfare and targeted assassinations to buy time, disrupt progress and shake the regime's confidence. The campaign delayed Iran's nuclear breakout, exposed key facilities and personnel and forced Tehran to spend resources on concealment.
