The recent spate of cyberattacks that have crippled British firms is largely being carried out by Russia, which used the outbreak of the conflict in Gaza as a “cover story” to deflect attention, the boss of one of the world’s largest cybersecurity firms has said.
Cloudflare chief executive Matthew Prince told City AM that the majority of high-profile hacks that have caused a string of blue-chip firms to shut down part of their operations were directed by Moscow and its network of criminal gangs.
“I think most of the high-profile attacks, if you trace them back, you’re going to find Russian fingerprints,” he said. “Not on all – some are 15-year-old hacker kids which, it turns out, the UK is good at producing. But… I think the largest sower of chaos behind them is Russia because that’s what they are, sowers of chaos.”
Heathrow, Marks and Spencer and Jaguar Land Rover have all been forced to deal with major attacks on their computer networks in the past few months, which have grounded flights, stopped car production, led to empty shelves and hit the economy.
JLR is still yet to return to full manufacturing capacity, more than two months on from its production lines being ground to a halt by an attack. Meanwhile M&S did not take click and collect orders for some 15 weeks while it recovered from its own crippling incursion.
Russia used Gaza as ‘cover’ for cyberattacks
Prince, whose firm is responsible for protecting over a fifth of the internet, had expected an outbreak of cyber warfare tantamount to “World War 3” after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, but was surprised when the number of cyberattacks actually dropped dramatically.
Instead, the tech entrepreneur said the proliferation of attacks in the UK was triggered by the conflict between Hamas and Israel.
“It turned out a lot of the cybercriminal gangs were made up of Russians and Ukrainians, and they tore themselves apart” in the early years of conflict in eastern Europe, he said.
“What caused the attacks in Europe to take off, was the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza. Because that provided a proxy where the Russians had – at least – a cover story that it wasn’t them [behind cyber attacks], it was the Iranians.”
Prince made the remarks during an interview in which he also unveiled Cloudflare’s plans to hire 400 UK interns next year as part of a push to hire more than 1,000 junior workers worldwide.
“The job market for young people is really, really hard, and I think that’s stupid.” he said.
“Because what we find is, when you go through massive transitions [like artificial intelligence], 50-year-old CEOs don’t have any earthly idea how transformative AI is going to be for things like writing code or doing sales, whereas our interns bring this incredible new DNA to the place.”