The leading countries of the West were warned by Russia's Vladimir Putin to stay out of his invasion of Ukraine and now there are reports he is amping up cyber warfare in retaliation.
Putin is ready to strike United Kingdom's power grid with a cyberattack to "turn out the lights for millions," as the NATO countries are already in a "hidden cyber war" with Russia, as they have "not just stepped up their attacks, but widened their targets to a number of NATO members and partners."
The cyber warfare on NATO, with a bullet on the U.K., might have begun in the early days of the war with "unofficial hacktivists," according to The Telegraph, but now with the use of North Korean troops on the Ukraine war front and the U.S. approving long-range missile strikes by Ukraine into Russia and setting up a missile base in Poland, the rhetoric and chess pieces are moving a bit faster in the final days of the Biden administration.
A "destabilizing and debilitating" strike on the U.K. is ready at Putin's go-ahead, Minister for Intergovernmental Relations of the U.K. Pat McFadden will reportedly say in a speech Monday, warning that cyberattacks are "increasingly frequent, and in some cases, increasingly sophisticated."
"There are gangs of cyber criminals and mercenaries not directly under the Kremlin's control, but who are allowed to act with impunity so long as they're not working against Putin's interests," McFadden said.
"They recently targeted NATO's Indo-Pacific partner South Korea in response to its monitoring of the deployment of North Korean troops to Kursk, where Russia is fighting Ukraine.
"And Russian state-aligned groups have taken responsibility for at least nine separate cyberattacks of varying severity against NATO states, including unprovoked attacks against our critical national infrastructure.
"These groups are unpredictable, they act with disregard for the potential geopolitical consequences, and with just one miscalculation could wreak havoc on our networks."
The testing of cyber vulnerabilities of the West have reportedly long been underway, but Russia is "exceptionally aggressive and reckless in the cyber realm" and now might be ready to pull some levers to gain "strategic advantage and degrade the states that support Ukraine," according to McFadden, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.
McFadden's remarks come before he will address the NATO cyber defense conference in London on Monday.
"In the U.K., Russia has targeted our media, our telecoms, our political and democratic institutions and our energy infrastructure," he said.
"Military hard power is one thing. But cyberwar can be destabilizing and debilitating. With a cyberattack, Russia can turn the lights off for millions of people. It can shut down the power grids. This is the hidden war Russia is waging with Ukraine."