November 2, 2025: Earlier this year, Russia hired or simply encouraged German based criminal hackers to engage in activities that hampered or just discouraged German support for Ukraine in its battles against Russian invaders. NATO officially and financially supports Ukraine. The German military/Bundeswehr was unable to detect who was responsible.
Western intelligence agencies believe Russia recently tried, and failed to take control of Romanian security cameras. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, its Cyber War unit 26165 has been hard at work all over Europe. NATO investigators have discovered more than 10,000 hacked internet addresses. The goal was to tap into surveillance cameras so that NATO movement of troops and supplies could be monitored. Romania has a 650 kilometers border with Ukraine and its ports use Chinese surveillance cameras. These have been banned by the U.S and European countries because of security concerns. The Romanian government pointed out that it played no role in the deployment of such security cameras. Nevertheless, the Romanians are checking into this.
Western nations have had similar problems for over a decade. In 2014 a new team of hackers was identified. This one had been concentrating on finding and taking political, diplomatic and military data from NATO nations involved in opposing Russian aggression in Ukraine. This group, called APT28, was identified as Russian by numerous patterns in their code, some of which was left behind or otherwise captured. This made it clear that the creators were Russian speakers, were working somewhere in the same time zone as Moscow and using software techniques known to come from Russia. That means hacker tools that are for sale on the black market. Moreover the data being sought would mainly benefit the Russian government. This sort of attack was showing up with increasing frequency and accuracy.
Over the last decade Internet security firms, especially Kaspersky Labs, FireEye and Symantec have developed better tools for identifying the hacker organizations responsible for some of the large-scale hacker attacks on business and government networks. For example in 2013 there was a group from China identified called Hidden Lynx. This group appeared to contain 50-100 hackers, each identified by their coding style and other clues. This group was believed largely responsible for a large-scale espionage campaign called Operation Aurora that was still active. The APT28 campaign, on the other hand, was quite recent and coincided with Western efforts to halt Russian attacks on Ukraine.
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