Russia Report: Foreign Services Launching Cyber-Attacks Following US Elections

The Russian Federal Security Bureau (FSB) has issued a new report today reporting that the nation is facing a series of preliminary cyber-attacks by foreign spy services, setting the scale for what are expected to be “large-scale cyber attacks.”

The report, issued through the Institute for National Securities Studies, says that they have evidence of plans to mass release provocative SMS-messages and statements on social media mocking the “Crisis of credit and the financial system in Russia,” after cyber-attacks badly destabilize the nation’s financial system.

Russian banks were targeted in a coordinated DDoS attack in November, around the US election. The hacking attacks overloaded some of the banks’ websites temporarily, but largely did not do serious harm, and was quickly forgotten.

The expectation from the FSB appears to be that much bigger, more aggressive cyber-attacks are coming, and while they did not attribute blame to any specific country in the report, it does come just days after President Obama openly promised to launch retaliatory cyber-attacks against Russia for its accused involvement in “hacking” the election.

Despite hyping their intention to do some sort of cyber-attack on Russia at some point, the US is not putting their fingerprints on any specific plots yet, and likely will continue to do so until they see if the attack is successful.