Last Updated on 19/03/2021 by Drashti
In what a Polish government official identified as a Russian cyberattack, two Polish government websites were hacked on Wednesday and briefly used to spread false information about a non-existent radioactive threat.
The websites of the National Atomic Energy Agency and the Ministry of Health briefly commented on a suspected nuclear waste leak from Lithuania that was threatening Poland.
In addition, a journalist’s Twitter account, which frequently writes about Russian and Eastern European affairs, was hacked and used to transmit the news.
The Associated Press quoted Stanislaw Zaryn, a spokesman for the country’s security services, as saying that “the whole storey looked like a typical Russian attempt” to sow mistrust and discord among Western allies.
According to Zaryn, a similar hacking attempt in 2020 spread misleading information about a non-existent radioactive cloud heading to Poland from Chernobyl, Ukraine, which was the site of a nuclear disaster in the 1980s.
The false statement issued on Wednesday stated that the health and lives of Polish people living along the Lithuanian border were in jeopardy. However, it seems that the messages went unnoticed.
