Russia is all set to launch a major cyberattack on home routers, ISPs and business firewalls located in UK and US says a joint statement issued by US Department of Homeland Security, FBI, CIA and UK’s National Cyber Security Center.
Security analysts suggest that Russia is turning into a most capable hostile adversary in cyberspace and might target the critical infrastructure of the said nations at the earliest.
The statement happens to be the first ever official technical alert issued by the two countries. And the officials from the two nations are urging members of the public and businesses to help combat cyber threats by following basic security precautions.
From the past few months, political dignitaries from the United States and Britain have been criticizing nations like Russia, North Korea, and China for conducting cyber espionage. In fact, in the past few weeks, Vladimir Putin led Russian Federation has been accused of launching ransomware attacks such as NotPetya on NHS.
All these days, Putin warded off the allegations with courtesy and added that his nation doesn’t have any empathy in breaking the peace and integrity of western countries.
Meanwhile, Ciaran Martin, the Chief Executive of the NCSC, a unit of British Intelligence agency GCHQ, has accused Putin’s government of launching attacks on multiple entities in past couple of years.
Martin says that his team has enough evidence to prove that Russia has launched several cyber attacks so far in order to conduct espionage and to steal intellectual property to utilize it in times of tension between nations.
Jeremy Fleming the director of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) said that millions of machines operating around the world such as routers have been already targeted by the cyber army of Russia and more such cyber invasions are on the menu.
Sources from Britain’s popular news website Daily Mail report that Britain is getting ready to retaliate cyber attacks of any range in near future. And a cyber army specifically trained for this purpose is said to be on the standby by the NCSC to combat any untoward incident in the cyber landscape.
