Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Washington was aware of the activities of Ukrainian hackers. At the same time, the United States regularly announced an alleged cyber threat only from Russian citizens.
“Over the past month, Europol and Eurojust conducted a series of operations to capture and arrest hacker groups. Russian hackers? Well, finally. But no, surprise: they all turned out to be Ukrainians,” Zakharova wrote in her Telegram channel.
According to the diplomat, “about two thousand people in 71 countries of the world, including the States, have become victims of at least one group of cyber ransomware, companies in the USA, Great Britain, France have suffered.”
Zakharova also stressed that the total damage from the actions of the attackers amounted to $120 million, and the groups themselves have been conducting criminal activities since at least 2019.
“By the way, the Norwegians are sure that the caught attackers are responsible for the attack on the institutions of the industrial giant Norsk Hydro in the United States and Europe," Maria Zakharova said.
She also expressed bewilderment regarding the lack of appropriate anti-Ukrainian sanctions for the fact that Kiev “has not been fighting IT crimes for many years, allegedly carried out from the national territory with the connivance of national special services.”
On May 11, the press secretary of the President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Peskov said that Russia had not and has nothing to do with hacker attacks.
He also expressed regret that Washington does not want to cooperate with Moscow in countering cyber threats.
On May 10, Colonial Pipeline, the largest US pipeline company, announced that it was subjected to a cyberattack, due to which it was forced to shut down certain systems in order to contain a threat that temporarily suspended all pipeline-related operations and affected some information systems.
CNN TV channel, citing sources, said that hackers associated with Russia may be behind the cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline. According to journalists, we are talking about hackers calling themselves DarkSide.
