Spain’s security services have reported over 72 cyberattacks on Spanish state and financial institutions from July 19 to 30 by hackers backed by the Russian state. The concerted barrage of cyber-attacks are thought to be Russian retaliation for Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s promise on his trip to Kyiv in Ukraine at the start of last month to support the government of Volodymyr Zelensky.
The group generally believed to be responsible for the Spanish attacks, the NoName057 collective, is reputed to be one of the Kremlin’s most active hacker groups and was formed soon after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Before focusing on Spain, NoName057’s primary targets were Ukrainian, American, and other European state and non-state websites.
The focus shifted to Spain on July 19 with attacks on well-known institutions such as La Moncloa, the Constitutional Court, banks, and the Justice and Territorial Policy ministries. Some reported attacks also hit military targets such as Systems Engineering for the Defence of Spain (Isdefe). Recent communications on the Telegram channels of NoName057 claimed: “Pedro is already paying a high price for participating in a power war against Russia.”
The claim of a high price paid is not strictly true as yet, since most of the reported attacks appear to have been relatively simple distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, typically overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic. These can be dealt with relatively easily and are little more than a significant nuisance to any organization with the type of defenses the targets most likely have in place.
But there are growing fears in Spain that the DDoS attacks of the last couple of weeks are merely a warm-up for a full-scale and well-coordinated cyber offensive targeting Spain’s national infrastructure and communications systems. According to a source close to the situation, Russia’s new cyber war against Spain aims to show any other heads of government tempted to support Ukraine that they will pay a high price for daring to challenge Russia’s territorial ambitions.
