Russian and Belarusian cyber saboteur group exposed in Poland

This was stated by Krzysztof Gawkowski, Poland's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digitalization. 

According to the minister, thanks to the cooperation of special services, it was possible to destroy a group of saboteurs who “had specific goals and operated from a specific location” in Poland. 

According to the minister, the purpose of the Belarusian and Russian services in Poland in the field of cybersecurity was to extort information and use individual and institutional blackmail. They planned to develop vectors of entry into a number of Polish institutions - at the level of local government and at the level of state-owned companies related to the security sector. 

Gawkowski did not specify which institutions he was talking about, but said that all of them had been informed of the dangers and risks. He added that the goal of the attacks was to cause political, military and economic paralysis of the state. 

“Operational and investigative actions are ongoing, but the goal set by the attackers, i.e., penetration, data extortion, and then blackmail, has been stopped,” Gawkowski said.

At a September 9 press conference on cybersecurity, the minister said that in the first half of 2024 alone, more than 400,000 incidents related to cyberattacks were registered, and the services took about 100,000 measures to detect threats that actually indicated attacks. At the same time, 370,000 incidents were registered in 2023.

“This shows that the number of incidents increased by 100% compared to last year,” he said. 

• In early June of this year, Russian hackers attempted to launch a coordinated cyberattack on Poland's critical infrastructure. The relevant Polish services prevented this, and the Polish government announced that it would spend 3 billion zlotys ($760 million) to strengthen cybersecurity measures after the attacks.
• German intelligence said that the Russian Intelligence Service hacker group had carried out cyberattacks against NATO and the EU.