BERLIN: Germany’s domestic secret service on Friday accused Russia of being behind a series of international cyber attacks aimed at spying and sabotage, in a “hybrid warfare” that also targeted the German parliament last year.

The operations cited by the BfV intelligence agency ranged from an aggressive attack called Sofacy or APT 28 that hit Nato members and knocked French TV station TV5Monde off air, to a hacking campaign called Sandstorm that brought down part of Ukraine’s power grid last year.

“Cyberspace is a place for hybrid warfare. It opens a new space of operations for espionage and sabotage,” said Hans-Georg Maassen, who heads the BfV agency.

“The campaigns being monitored by the BfV are generally about obtaining information, that is spying,” he said. “However, Russian secret services have also shown a readiness to carry out sabotage.”

Germany itself fell victim to one of these rogue operations, with the Sofacy attack last year hitting the German lower house of parliament. That Trojan operation also affected a computer in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s legislative office, local media reported.

The BfV said the “cyber attacks carried out by Russian secret services are part of multi-year international operations that are aimed at obtaining strategic information”. “Some of these operations can be traced back as far as seven to 11 years.”

IT experts believe that Sofacy or APT 28 is a so-called phishing tool of the broader Operation Pawn Storm that has been blamed for targeting Nato and the US government and military as well as Ukrainian activists and Russian dissidents.

The operation included the attempted hacking of the Dutch Safety Board’s computer systems by Russian spies seeking to access a sensitive final report into the July 2014 shooting down of flight MH17 over Ukraine, according to security experts Trend Micro.

Published in Dawn, May 14th, 2016