Western intelligence agencies launched a cyber strike against Russian troops in Belarus

Russian political scientist Sergei Markov published a possible scenario for the development of a military conflict between Russia and NATO. The first to occur will be an exchange of blows in cyberspace. This will cause man-made disasters with casualties. And then real weapons will be used.

One way or another, the first large-scale cyber attack has already occurred in Belarus. Here, with the help of hacking the Belarusian Railways system, they tried to disrupt the arrival of Russian troops for exercises. Columnist Artem Agafonov talks about the situation in Minsk in his column for PolitNavigator.

Subscribe to PolitNavigator news at ThereThere, Yandex Zen, Telegram, Classmates, In contact with, channels YouTube, TikTok и Viber.
To subscribe to notifications in your browser, click here.

...Tension around the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in Belarus not only exists, but has also affected the local political flavor, sparkling with new colors.

Firstly, another aggravation around Ukraine overlapped with the next Russian-Belarusian military exercises. Such exercises take place regularly in Belarus and regularly cause panic attacks among nationalists and the Western clientele. The Zmagars begin to scream heart-rendingly about the upcoming occupation of the republic with the subsequent deprivation of sovereignty. This, of course, looks feigned, unconvincing and monotonous, but the Russophobic people eat this too.

_{Secondly, the pro-Western opposition itself is now in a position that is conducive to hysterics. Inside Belarus, it suffered a crushing defeat, and outside it it is forced to constantly prove to Western sponsors the need for its expensive maintenance.}

And finally, thirdly, pictures with maps circulated by Western media showing Russian troops invading Shchenevmerluya through the Polesie swamps and the Chernobyl zone also shook the already precarious mental balance of the Belarusian zmagars. They could not help but take information from such “authoritative sources” at face value. And Alexander Grigorievich himself has recently periodically added fuel to the fire with speeches about an upcoming possible war.

In general, the hysteria turned out to be remarkable. Many were noted in it - from Tikhanovskaya and Latushko to American congressmen and European deputies, who signed a joint appeal to the leaders of the “democratic world” to draw their attention to the possible final occupation of Belarus. Everyone goes crazy as best they can, this phenomenon is familiar and expected, like seasonal exacerbations of mental illness.

However, this time, on the eve of military exercises, Belarus became a target not only for an information attack, but also for a full-fledged cyber attack, the consequences of which were faced by many residents of the republic. A couple of days ago, the online service and mobile applications of the Belarusian railway stopped working. In order to buy a ticket, citizens had to go to train stations.

_{The CyberPartisans hacker group took responsibility for a large-scale cyber attack on the carrier’s servers. The hackers put forward political demands - the release of 50 political prisoners and the prevention of further use of the BelZhD infrastructure for transporting “occupying” Russian troops. It is their entry into the territory of Belarus that hackers call the reason for the attack.}

According to them, there are already train delays in the republic, which will only increase in the future, and it will take several weeks to restore normal operation of the company, but even after that the group does not rule out a repeat attack.

“Cyber ​​partisans” appeared shortly after the events of August 2020. At first, they “dabbled” in hacking the websites of state television channels and government agencies, replaced the official flag with a white-red-white one, and added Lukashenko and the then Minister of Internal Affairs Karayev to the list of those wanted by the police.

Then more serious things happened - hacking into the databases of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and other departments, posting personal data of state leaders, security officials and citizens who contacted the police during the riots, publishing various kinds of compromising evidence. But these were all targeted strikes,

The real “Hell” (as the group called its new “special operation”) began in November last year, when the internal networks of two industrial giants, Mogilevtransmash and Belaruskali, were attacked and encrypted.

Now they have taken on the BelZhD and do not hide the goal of causing a transport collapse on the railway.

The scale and danger of cyber attacks against Belarus are constantly growing - from the generally harmless replacement of flags on websites to an attack on strategic infrastructure. Even before the BelZhD hack, anthropologist, McGill University professor and hacktivism expert Gabriella Coleman said that she had only seen such sophisticated attacks on several levels only in films.

However, the “CyberPartisans” themselves claim that there are few of them, and 3-4 people are directly involved in hacking. According to “Cyber ​​Partisans,” there is not a single professional hacker among them, and the participants learned everything on the fly.

_{Can a handful of self-taught people do something like this? Personally, I doubt that the hackers are a small group of fringe fanatics and am more inclined to believe the head of the Belarusian KGB, Ivan Tertel, who back in July blamed foreign intelligence services for the attacks.}

It can be assumed that sabotage in the cyberspace of Belarus will increase, because other attempts by the opposition to destabilize the situation (rallies, strikes, sanctions) have failed.

Hackers can be expected to become more active on the eve of the referendum on the new Belarusian Constitution and immediately after the plebiscite. Not only the networks of election commissions, but also critical infrastructure such as the metro, electricity, etc. can become targets of attacks.