The Israeli cybersecurity company Check Point Software Technologies estimates that, based on data from the first six months of 2022, every week in Poland there are on average 1,100 cyber attacks carried out on any given military or government sector entity, but that the vast majority of them are blocked by cyber security systems which are in place.
The attacks aim to undermine the credibility of a given institution or state and to access strategic data. It is expected that attacks on Polish military institutions will only increase.
According to experts from Google, the Ghostwriter/UNC1151 hackers group has attacked Polish military and government email accounts, and has attempted to steal passwords of Polish and Ukrainian officials.
Ghostwriter/UNC1151 is tied to the Belarusian regime, while Fancy Bear and Killnet are linked to the Kremlin and Mustang Panda to China.
British weekly The Record in February confirmed that Polish military institutions have been targeted by hackers and that the Polish government has played down the leakage of data by saying the databases that have fallen into the hands of hackers do not contain secret or sensitive information.
But Russian hackers in March tried to break into NATO data to extract verification codes. That hack was conducted by either the Coldriver or Callisto groups.
Hackers are also reported to have increased activities against Polish companies. According to Check Point, the number of attacks has increased by 35 percent since January.
Faced with growing threats, the Polish government has created a Cyberspace Defense Force. Defense Minister Mariusz Błaszczak said recently that cyber attacks have become an important tool in the aggressive approach taken by Russia. At the end of May, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki extended the level of alert of Bravo and Charlie-CRP, which had been introduced to counter the threats in cyberspace.
