Nato member Sweden hit by cyber attacks

SWEDEN has suffered a spike in cyber attacks since joining Nato as Russia steps up electronic disruptions in northern Europe.

A report from the cybersecurity company Cloudflare reported that distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks, which seek to overload or slow down computer systems by flooding them with traffic, rose by 466pc after it joined Nato in March.

Cloudflare has insight into the global state of such attacks because of its role protecting much of the internet’s infrastructure from DDOS efforts. Russia was not named as the source of the increase in attacks, but hackers linked to Moscow have been accused of launching repeated attacks against Sweden.

Finland was hit with a similar increase in DDOS attacks in the run-up to the country joining Nato last year, with attempted cyber attacks at one point accounting for more than 80pc of internet traffic in the country.

Sweden officially became Nato’s 32nd member when it joined in March.

Last year, Swedish cyber security company Truesec found that a hacking group claiming to be made up of Islamists from Sudan was in fact linked to Russia. The Anonymous Sudan group, which hit Swedish airports and banks, was likely to have been created as part of an attempt to thwart Nato’s accession to Nato, Truesec said.

Russia has been blamed for a spike in GPS jamming incidents in Northern Europe and the Baltics in recent months. In March, a jet carrying Grant Shapps, the Defence Secretary, lost access to the satellite navigation system near Kaliningrad, in an incident blamed on Russian disruption.

DDOS attacks involve hacking software taking control of millions of unsecured devices. Cloudflare said it had stopped 4.5m attacks in the first three months of 2024, up 50pc on a year ago.