Leonid Bershidsky: Russian cybersnake may be Putin’s secret weapon
It shouldn't be easy to shut down a European ministry for days, depriving bureaucrats of access to e-mail and the web. Someone, however, has managed to do just that to Belgium's foreign ministry, which had to quarantine its entire computer system last Saturday and only managed to restore the work of the passport and visa processing systems on Thursday. Similar attacks seem to be taking place elsewhere in Europe, as Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynderstold the Belga news agency after meeting with a senior French diplomat that "everyone (on the European level) notes at this moment a very powerful pickup in hacking activity probably coming from the east and in any case having to do with Ukraine."