The expert warned of a change in the nature of cyber warfare against Russia

The nature of the cyber war waged against the Russian Federation has changed recently — it has become more systemic, sophisticated and destructive, and the goals, scope and methods have become noticeably more complex. This was told to Izvestia by incident response expert Angara MTDR Yan Blinov.

"The Western world is focused on doing maximum damage to us"

Dmitry Prendetsky, CEO of RT-Information Security, how AI has changed the speed of hacker attacks on domestic infrastructure and how Russian specialists deal with them.

The focus, he said, has shifted from a demonstrative effect to purposefully causing maximum damage to specific Russian organizations, with an emphasis on disrupting processes, data loss, service shutdowns, and long-term consequences for businesses and government agencies.

Industries where a failure quickly turns into real damage to people and the economy are becoming targets for attacks aimed at the complete destruction of information, the source said. The most notable in 2025 were attacks on telecom and Internet service providers, air carriers and transportation companies, as well as electronic trading platforms.

"It is critical and massively used services that are the most vulnerable, and not just the classic "critical infrastructure" in the narrow sense: the more an organization is embedded in the daily life of society, the more noticeable the consequences of an attack," the expert explained.

At the same time, changing the nature of threats does not require a radically new approach to protection, he noted. Modern systems are capable of detecting and blocking a significant part of attacks, but for many organizations this complex is simply not built: there are not enough specialists, there is not enough budget, the response and recovery processes are not debugged, and security measures are implemented fragmentarily.

Therefore, the most effective protection against the threat of losing data due to the actions of intruders is based on an integrated, layered system where technologies, processes and people work together, the expert pointed out.

"Isolating critical segments, having immutable backups, regular recovery exercises, and raising staff awareness are especially important to protect against attacks aimed at destroying data. It is important not only to detect and localize the incident, but also the team's ability to quickly return services to working order after the attack," Blinov concluded.

Read more in the Izvestia article:

Scorched earth tactics: hackers attacking the Russian Federation have moved to total destruction of data