Security Experts:

Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Cybercrime

Polish State Websites Hacked and Used to Spread False Info

Two Polish government websites were hacked Wednesday and used briefly to spread false information about a non-existent radioactive threat, in what a Polish government official said had the hallmarks of a Russian cyberattack.

Two Polish government websites were hacked Wednesday and used briefly to spread false information about a non-existent radioactive threat, in what a Polish government official said had the hallmarks of a Russian cyberattack.

The National Atomic Energy Agency and Health Ministry websites briefly carried claims of a supposed nuclear waste leak coming from neighboring Lithuania and threatening Poland.

In addition, the Twitter account of a journalist who often writes about Russian and eastern European affairs was also hacked and used to further spread the information.

Stanislaw Zaryn, spokesman for the head of the country’s security services, told The Associated Press that “the whole story looked like a typical Russian attempt” to sow suspicion and division among Western allies.

Zaryn said it recalled a similar hacking attempt in 2020 which spread false information about a non-existent radioactive cloud heading to Poland from Chernobyl in Ukraine — the site of a nuclear disaster in the 1980s.

Wednesday’s false statement warned that the health and lives of Polish people living in an area close to the Lithuanian border were in danger. But the messages apparently did not receive much notice.

Related: Poland, Lithuania Probe Russian-made App Behind Viral Old Age Selfies

Related: Poland to Launch Cyberspace Defense Force

Written By

Click to comment

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Join this webinar to learn best practices that organizations can use to improve both their resilience to new threats and their response times to incidents.

Register

Join this live webinar as we explore the potential security threats that can arise when third parties are granted access to a sensitive data or systems.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Cybercrime

Zendesk is informing customers about a data breach that started with an SMS phishing campaign targeting the company’s employees.

Cybercrime

Satellite TV giant Dish Network confirmed that a recent outage was the result of a cyberattack and admitted that data was stolen.

Cybercrime

The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 has demonstrated the potential of AI for both good and bad.

Cybercrime

The changing nature of what we still generally call ransomware will continue through 2023, driven by three primary conditions.

Application Security

PayPal is alerting roughly 35,000 individuals that their accounts have been targeted in a credential stuffing campaign.

Cybercrime

No one combatting cybercrime knows everything, but everyone in the battle has some intelligence to contribute to the larger knowledge base.

Cybercrime

As it evolves, web3 will contain and increase all the security issues of web2 – and perhaps add a few more.

Cybercrime

A recently disclosed vBulletin vulnerability, which had a zero-day status for roughly two days last week, was exploited in a hacker attack targeting the...