A cybercrime group “very close” to the Kremlin, Killnet, which has targeted pro-Ukraine countries such as Portugal in its attacks, on Wednesday launched a call to arms for the recruitment of new members, the CEO of the company Visionware told Lusa news agency.
Bruno Castro, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Visionware, stressed that this is the second time in less than a week that ‘Killnet’ has launched an identical call, after the last one, last Thursday and Friday, affected institutions linked to the area of health in several countries, including Portugal, where the portals of the national health authority (DGS) and the pharmacy faculty were affected.
According to the CEO of the NATO-accredited company in information security and cybersecurity solutions, the group of Russian cyberactivists has launched several recruitment campaigns for cyberattacks on several Western countries, besides the United States, allegedly in response to the pro-Ukraine alignment, in which Portugal is included.
“The relationship that Killnet has with the Russian state, or very close to the Kremlin, goes through the notion that it’s either outsourced as a mercenary or it’s even by political affiliation. They are carrying out ultraviolent attacks directed at all kinds of critical infrastructures on a continuous basis. There has been a wave of attacks here that has been very successful”, he stressed.
That success, he continued, and building on last week’s attacks, has had media hype and aimed, as with other forays, at creating a brand of the ‘Killnet’ group.
“[The success] serves to ‘killnet’ to promote itself as the author or originator of the attacks and to be able to recruit more soldiers to increase its strength, on the one hand, and at the same time also increase its destruction and attack capacity for the new waves that will follow,” the Visionware CEO stressed.
“Cyber warfare has been around for a long time. What has been happening is the automation and professionalisation of these cybercriminal groups to be able to do these kinds of deeds on behalf of a state. It will be the next step and, typically, in a very conventional pirate analogy, depending on which history book we read, I may be seen as a malicious pirate, criminal or thief, as well as I may be seen, on the other side of history, as a military hero”, he sustained.
According to Bruno Castro, in this context, there is also a broader approach outside the United States “with the idea that everything that are pro-Ukraine states will also be the target, afterwards, of devastating attacks”.
“This [attack] was clearly covered in the media and they made sure it was so. There has already been another ‘call to arms’ here from other cybercriminal groups or ‘lone wolves’ who also wanted to support the ’cause’ and this will be an ongoing process, which will continue, in which Portugal fits into this context because it is avowedly pro-Ukraine and will be part, in theory, of the next targets of Killnet or other Russia-supporting cybercriminal groups,” he added.
In Portugal, he continued, what Visionware has done is no more than what it has done worldwide.
“We work a lot on the preventive component, that of ‘awareness’, being able to constantly analyse and monitor what is happening in this criminal underworld and, in parallel, to be, continuously, ‘stressing’ the security infrastructures of our clients, as well as giving attention to the internal mechanisms to react and recover from cyber attacks,” he explained.
“Attacks of this nature and very targeted at critical infrastructures (…) are clearly the concept of cyber warfare: attacking with violence, interrupting the basic services of a society and calling into question the rule of law,” he maintained.
“From there, [the intention is] to create instant instability in the populace, through panic and instilling a sense of terror and insecurity through the interruption of basic services, such as energy, communications, water, transport, banking. This is what sustains the basic pillars of a society which, when interrupted in a digital war logic, has an impact and is sometimes more violent than a conventional, military war”, he summarised.
