Tag Archive for: Finland

Cyberattack On Finland Intensifies, Hits Critical Sectors

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The NoName ransomware group, suspected to have Russian affiliations, has reportedly intensified its cyberattack on Finland. The recent wave of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks has targeted a wide array of critical sectors in Finland.

The NoName cyberattacks have zeroed in on a variety of critical sectors encompassing the Energy Industry Association, which plays a pivotal role in overseeing the nation’s energy policies.

Additionally, Technical Academic TEK, representing technical professionals and engineers, has become a target, signifying a deliberate assault on key intellectual and technical expertise in the country.

Further intensifying the impact, the cyber onslaught extends to Oikeus.fi, Finland’s legal information portal, underlining the hacker group’s interest in disrupting legal infrastructure.

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The Association of Municipalities, a collaborative body uniting local municipalities, faces the brunt of the attacks, impacting the decentralized governance structure.

Simultaneously, the Consumer Disputes Board, responsible for resolving consumer conflicts, becomes another casualty, illustrating a comprehensive assault on various facets of Finnish society and services.

In Detail: Cyberattack on Finland

The severity of the cyberattack on Finland claim is sensed by the diverse industries targeted, indicating a strategic and widespread campaign. If a cyberattack on Finland is proven true, the impact of this multi-industry attack could be far-reaching.

The situation further intensifies with the hacker group’s message, which reads, “We continue to remind the Finnish government how bad the idea of locating a NATO base near Russia is.”

cyberattack on Finland
Source: FalconFeedsio

The Cyber Express team conducted a thorough check of the websites reportedly under attack by NoName and found them operating smoothly. However, attempts to glean more details from the affected organizations proved futile, as there has been no official response from any entity as of the time of writing this report.

Previous Cyberattack on Finland 

In the first week of January 2024, NoName, a ransomware group launched a series of cyberattacks on several Finnish…

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Finland sees fourfold spike in ransomware attacks since joining NATO, senior cyber official says

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Ransomware attacks targeting Finnish organizations have increased four-fold since the Nordic country began the process of joining NATO last year, according to a senior official.

In an interview with Recorded Future News on Thursday, Sauli Pahlman, the deputy director general for Finland’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), cautioned that “correlation doesn’t equal causality,” but said he believed the surge in cases was linked to geopolitics.

Finland, which had historically declared itself to be a non-aligned country – in part due to troubled relations with Russia, with whom it shares a 830-mile border – applied to join NATO following the invasion of Ukraine.

In June, the country expelled nine diplomats from the Russian embassy in Helsinki and accused them of undertaking intelligence missions in contravention of the Vienna convention on diplomatic relations.

The expulsion of alleged Russian intelligence officers throughout Europe prompted the head of Finnish Security Intelligence Service (SUPO) to warn last year that Russia would “turn to the cyber environment” for espionage due to challenges impacting its human intelligence work.

At the time, SUPO’s director Antti Pelttari said that the agency considered it “unlikely that any cyberattack will paralyze critical infrastructure [in Finland] in the near future.”

NCSC’s Pahlman echoed this position, telling Recorded Future News he didn’t “consider it very likely that we [will] really see a cyber incident in Finland that really closes down something that’s critical for society — food, electricity, water — on a wide scale.”

But the NCSC still issued a public alert last September, elevating the cyber threat level to encourage organizations and the public to be aware of the potential for disruptive incidents. The threat level “continues to be elevated as we speak, the situation hasn’t changed,” said Pahlman.

The number of cyber incidents which Pahlman said were clearly perpetrated by state-sponsored actors “has not, at least up to today, increased in a way that I could say that there has really been a step-up. [But] what we can certainly say is that the ransomware cases — which tend to have much…

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DDoS attacks rise as pro-Russia groups attack Finland, Israel

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Image: Golden Sikorka/Adobe Stock

The pro-Russia hacker group NoName057(16) reportedly claimed it was behind Denial of Service (DoS) attacks against the Finnish parliament’s website on Tuesday, the day the country joined NATO. The country’s Technical Research Centre of Finland was also hacked, according to Finnish news site, YLE. NoName057(16) is the same group that took responsibility for a distributed denial of service attack, taking down the website for the country’s parliament last August, and who also attacked Ukraine, the U.S., Poland and other European countries.

In January, multiple outlets reported that GitHub had disabled NoName057(16)’s account after the group was linked to attempts to hack the Czech presidential election candidates’ websites.

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Israel hit by Killnet proxy

This week, Russia-aligned hacktivists also attacked one of the biggest names in security, Check Point, along with universities and medical centers in Israel, the Jerusalem Post reported.

The group called itself “Anonymous Sudan,” but Nadir Izrael, CTO and co-founder of Israel-based asset visibility and security firm Armis, said the attacker is likely aligned with pro-Russia hacktivist group Killnet.

“For the most part the way security companies track these groups is based on the kinds of messages they post and similarities in text and tools,” he said. “The messages that come from these groups are mostly in Russian and English. It’s a bit like how the FBI does profiling: they look for similar MOs and tools, and backtrack to sources. In the case of DDoS attacks you are looking at lots of different devices worldwide from different regions of the world that are all at once trying to access a certain web site.”

He said it is likely that the next attack will occur on April 7, 2023, as part of the annual OpIsrael, when hackers and hacktivists attack Israeli organizations, companies and personalities.

“Even if the disruption itself doesn’t seem prominent, a cyberattack on a government or an organization can create an underlying fear of chaos amongst citizens,” he said, adding that 33% of global organizations are not taking the threat of…

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Why NATO needs to admit not only Finland but also Google

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A popular joke circulating online among Russian dissidents goes something like this: A Moscovite wife asks her husband if he understands what the war in Ukraine is about. Yes, thunders the husband, repeating the regime’s talking points—it’s a Russian campaign against NATO’s aggression! The wife continues, asking how the war is going, and here the husband grows somber, saying that the brave Russian military has sustained heavy losses, including more than 18,000 dead. And how many casualties, the wife inquires, did NATO suffer? The husband shrugs his shoulders. “I don’t know,” he says. “NATO hasn’t showed up yet.”

Like all good punch lines, this one, too, is multilayered. Neatly folded into the blunt criticism of Putin’s bloodbath is a larger realization about the way we wage war these days, and about how the old structures erected to keep the world at peace are no longer working.

NATO, alas, is Exhibit A. How did the alliance, formed in the aftermath of World War II and designed to stop precisely the sort of aggression now displayed by Russia, respond to Putin’s invasion? The most honest assessment we have comes courtesy of Ukraine’s president. Speaking to a summit of NATO leaders earlier this spring, Volodymyr Zelensky checked off a long list of NATO failures, from refusing to set up a no-fly zone to delivering too few weapons and munitions. “All the people who will die from this day will die because of you as well,” Zelensky said.

This pressing criticism begs an equally pressing question: If NATO is no longer an effective bulwark to keep the world’s bad guys at bay, what might its replacement look like? Having made a career in cybersecurity, assessing and defending against a different and ascendant type of risk, permit me a modest proposal: If you want world peace, think less England, France, and Germany, and more Google, Apple, and PayPal.

Let’s review the evidence. For one thing, the multinational corporations that generate so much of our economic growth have the technological capacities—to say nothing of the budgets—to design and implement the sort of swift and effective deterrence no government could easily provide. When PayPal exited the…

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