Reportedly, the Russian government has warned the U.S. and its allies that continued cyber-attacks on its infrastructure risks a “direct military clash.”
The threats follow reports from last week that Russia’s Ministry of Construction, Housing and Utilities website had been hacked and replaced with a message stating “Glory to Ukraine” on its homepage.
A foreign ministry statement blamed actors in the U.S. and Ukraine for increasing attacks on state institutions and critical infrastructure, according to Reuters.
The statement claimed that the U.S. was “deliberately lowering the threshold for the combat use” of IT. They threatened real-world retaliation.
It reportedly said, “the militarization of the information space by the West, and attempts to turn it into an arena of interstate confrontation, have greatly increased the threat of a direct military clash with unpredictable consequences.”
DDoS attacks have escalated since the start of the conflict. The websites of many Russian state-owned companies and government organisations, including banks and airlines, have been disrupted.
Other attacks have taken a different approach whereby they seek to compromise and leak user data or wipe customer and corporate records from cloud databases.
President Putin was forced to publicly recognise the scale of the impact of attacks last month. He called for reduced reliance on foreign-made software and hardware, as well as enhanced cyber-defences.
Conversely, Russia has been blamed for a large number of DDoS and destructive malware attacks in Ukraine since the beginning of the invasion.
