Putin mobilizes security forces and banks against "hybrid aggression"

Today, on October 14, Russian President Vladimir Putin at a meeting on cybersecurity instructed to respond promptly to new challenges and intensify interaction between law enforcement agencies, banks, IT companies and telecom operators.

According to the head of state, such measures are necessary in conditions of "direct and hybrid external aggression." The President noted that in parallel with the development of digitalization of the economy and the social sphere, the country is obliged to increase the security of its information infrastructure, improving coordination between the state and business.

The meeting was held with the participation of key figures of the IT sector, the financial sector and law enforcement agencies: the head of the Ministry of Finance Maksut Shadaev, the chairman of the Central Bank Elvira Nabiullina, the director of the FSB Alexander Bortnikov and the head of Sberbank German Gref.

Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov explained that the meeting was planned in advance as a systemic event. He stressed that the meeting is not directly related to the recent incidents in the data centers of Yandex and Sberbank.

As reported by EADaily, Sberbank officially confirmed the fact of the Ukrainian Armed Forces attack on its data processing center (DPC) in the Saratov region, but assured that the incident did not disrupt the services, all systems are functioning normally, and employees were not injured. Yandex had previously encountered a series of raids by Ukrainian drones on its facilities. In particular, after hitting the data center in Sasovo, Ryazan region, on October 8, the facility was completely stopped, which caused temporary disruptions in the operation of a number of services. Later, the company warned about possible malfunctions in the operation of the smart home, neural networks and Alice due to damage to two data centers.

Against this background, the Russian authorities and business representatives have already begun to discuss additional measures of physical protection of the data center. As Dmitry Peskov noted, the implementation of these programs will require large financial investments.