Hackers in Sweden – Cyberwar
They used to be American teens, then Chinese, North Korean, and now Russian
We would all prefer to not talk about them – to just look the other way, as we always do here in Sweden.
Hackers.
They are getting more and more insisting, making our digitalized world dysfunctional and counterproductive. Instead of paying easily with “Swish”, a concept that connects a bank account to a phone number through a simple app, to arrange for payments in seconds, we now regularly have to use other means – every time Swish is under attack, which is often.
Of course, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and all the credit cards will do theirs, so I doubt that many people seriously run out of options for paying, but still, it costs some extra trouble and confusion to first try Swish and then find out it doesn’t work today, and then what to do…
And what if I would now check the TV news on the national TV station SVT? On their website, as I always do it. Well, I have for several days now been met with a message that it doesn’t work. They have technical problems. At times such level of problems that they can’t even tell that they have them.
They are both, Swish and SVT, being hit regularly and hard by hacker attacks, the so-called DDOS or “distributed denial of services”, where thousands or millions of computers around the globe all try to get access to the site simultaneously (for instance initiated through viruses), which the web servers cannot handle. And then things stop working.
These two are not alone. Many public authorities and private companies experience it regularly, but often so that it is mostly an annoyance or a disturbance of public services, more than an attempt to steal data or lay down a company.
They are attacks on all of us normal people who are just trying to live our digitalized lives in peace.
And peace is the word.
We are, actually, at war. Or so do they see it in Russia. Our Scandinavian authorities are convinced that it is now mostly Russia who are behind such attacks, as part of their attempt to break down our society and its stability.
There are also physical attacks, for instance recently on a long line of mobile antennas on the Swedish east coast. Also suspected to have been arranged by Russia “through proxy”, which is a new expression we will learn going forward: when someone makes another do the bad stuff instead of doing it themselves. Apparently, Russia hires professional criminals, who will do anything for money, and this way they can sabotage things in Sweden without actually sending any Russian agents to us. Not that those are missing, though, as there regularly are revelations of spies, but they don’t need to be here for our society to be destroyed – many people who are already in Sweden are more than happy to do such things.
So, this all is the official line of the story.
I am not saying that it is wrong – I don’t know if it is – but what I want to stress is that it is a dangerous path to enter. When our government calls everything that doesn’t work for “a deliberate attack commissioned by an enemy state”, the door has been opened for the suppression of free speech and free movement, and for putting people in prison for presumed treason, perhaps setting aside all the normal legal protection mechanism that should ensure us all a fair trial, etc.
All the same happens all over Europe, btw., but Swedish media tends to tell about Sweden only, as if we are special. Danish media similarly tells about Denmark. But somehow, the news slipped through recently, that there were something like 60 major hacker attacked across Europe each day1.
It is always difficult to know the details because, first of all, not many know them so that they can tell – hacking does take place in the hidden, most often, and the visible results, such as websites not working, are then just the tip of the iceberg. So, a journalist trying to count a day’s events will most likely only see that tip. A senior security officer in some high-level agency will perhaps know about more attacks, but there are then additional attacks that are not known yet, and perhaps never will get known to anyone else than those who arranged them.
It can be difficult, as well, to know who did the attacks. Currently, journalists enjoy asking military experts for advice on such things, and these are notoriously skeptical against Russia, so they will point that way as the first thing, no matter if they know anything or not. Politicians do the same, currently. It is politically correct to accuse Russia.
Of course, maybe it is Russia most of the time, but I doubt that all the other hackers in the world have gone on vacation. There are hackers everywhere, and some groups of them have occasionally been the scape-goats, while the rest have not been mentioned during that time. My guess is that the truth is bigger: there are many more attacks than being reported, and many more hackers from many more places, commissioned by many more parties, than the news media typically want to deal with.
It is much easier to blame just one at a time.
We have made ourselves very vulnerable, as almost everything is digital now. In Denmark, even the distribution of letters is set to end by the end of this year. The politicians believe that letters are old-fashioned, together with money, but more about that below:
Electronic tickets are now the norm. It was long ago, the decision to stop accepting cash payment in the buses of Copenhagen, Denmark. Malmö, Sweden, followed a bit after. Various electronic ways of paying for the ticket has then been tried out, but the end effect is that it is now something you do with your mobile phone.
The national trains and various other transportation means are using similar (or the same) systems, where a ticket most often can be shown on your mobile screen as a QR code, and the controller then uses their mobile phone to read that code and check that the ticket is valid.
If you lose your phone or run out of battery, you have no ticket. The rules state that it is your problem, and you will be fined.
Cash payments have almost vanished from almost all other areas as well, and it is now a rare event to see someone pay with cash in a supermarket. So far, it is still possible, though, but almost nobody ever does it.
The national bank of Denmark recently withdrew the largest Danish banknote, the 1000 kr (Danish kroner) note, as it was considered unnecessary today – only criminals use them, was the rationale.
There has been implemented rules in Denmark about how much cash you are allowed to pay in one go. I think it was 20,000 kr until recently and it has now been reduced to half of that. Paying a larger amount by cash is now a criminal act and can lead to prison or fines.
All information from public authorities is now sent electronically, and the Scandinavian countries have arranged for all citizens (in a way different for each country) to have an electronic mailbox. Any message from the tax office, for instance, or from any other authority, will as a basic rule be sent to that mailbox, and each citizen is obliged to check what is there.
It is mandatory to have a bank account, and as a result, banks are obliged to provide one for you, given a few conditions: you have no bank account in that country already, and you do live in the country. They can charge a fee for creating the account plus a yearly fee for maintaining it, but they cannot refuse to create it. However, if you live abroad or already have an account, they can refuse, and they do. It has become increasingly difficult to live, work, and act across the borders, also within the Scandinavian area. We used to consider us almost one country, but this is getting further away from reality all the time now.
Also, buying an insurance has become a very national thing, with most insurance companies rejecting customers from other countries.
The restrictions by banks and insurance companies are a bit peculiar, considering that these companies have merged across the borders, in the beginning (some years ago) with the argument that they could then provide services across the borders, but now the service offerings of that kind are actually fewer and more restricted than ever before.
Which is another result of the increasing digitalization: There are more possibilities now for tracking money across borders, which puts the financial companies under pressure to both document more and also prevent criminal activities. And more things are considered criminal today than before, with money laundry a top scorer, but also the support of organizations that are considered related to terrorist activities, and any scheme that could be seen as an attempt to avoid paying taxes.
It is, by now, impossible to live a life off grid in Sweden or Denmark. And it is impossible to just divide your time freely between the two countries, as it will lead to complex tax problems and problems with transferring money to where you need them.
And that is a somewhat unexpected side effect of the digitalization: instead of freeing us from being at a particular place, as we can now always get our mail electronically and do our work from wherever we are, we actually find ourselves tied more than ever to a certain location. All the former, hard-gained freedoms to travel, speak, arrange savings, be ourselves and decide ourselves what parts of our lives to share with others, have basically been lost.
The funny thing is that it has sneaked in under the cover of making everything easier. And things have become easier, if you are a conformist. But for anyone attempting to act as an individualist, everything has become more difficult.
And then, all the digitalization has opened our society for the world to hack and destroy.
The ones having a benefit out of all this, are, in fact, not us, the citizens, but rather the big providers of the electronic services – yes, you guessed it, mostly the big American companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc.
These companies thrive on everything being digital, and they do not care about individual freedom. Or hacking.
So, we now have a society where we are all bound to use the services that increasingly do not work because of cyber attacks.
What is then the natural reaction? To re-introduce cash payments, and abandon the requirement to have a bank acoount and an electronic mailbox, and to re-instate the almost completely dismantled snail-mail system?
No, we must digitalize more! That’s the mantra. But at the same time, say the wise Swedish politicians, we need to make sure to have some cash at home, just in case of a war is coming that would ruin the electronic means of payment.
Aha? There are no bank affiliates anymore – all closed. Any bank office that may be left has no cash. If you enter one of them in order to cash in some money to your account, you’ll be met with great suspicion. There are ATMs, a few of them left, often restricted to let you take out 100 € or similar in one go. Anything more will be met with suspicion.
And nobody has thought of what to do if the electronic mailboxes do not work, or the systems for automatic payments. Or anything else, actually.
Maybe that’s why Russia, or whoever, finds it both easy and rewarding to attack us electronically.
Instead of protecting ourselves against such attacks by having a more diverse society with several parallel means of payment and message distribution, we do what? We buy more bombs and guns and other military stuff. Because we, by tradition, cannot grasp that war today is electronic. We are already at war, and the bombs and guns will not help us.
What we need is to get that lost freedom back, through which we would be much less prone to get hurt by any electronic attack.
After posting the article, I got access to the place (on svt.se) where this number had been mentioned – apparently the hackers were having a break, so the site worked again – and I could see that it was not a count of daily attacks: it was instead the number of attacks that had been examined by the journalists behind the news, and these were from all over Europe and stretching over about a year. It is not clear from the article if this number is considered to be a total or just an arbitrary selection of attacks, and it is not mentioned either how they were generally selected or where the information about them came from. Only that the 60 was picked out of a gross list of 80 as those that were suspected to be related to Russia. Here is the original article: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/60-hybridattacker-mot-europa-sparen-pekar-mot-ryssland, and were categorized as “hybrid attacks”.
I recall that our friend Flogerta Lessi recently raised a similar question: we are putting all our eggs in one digital basket. That makes us not only vulnerable to cyber attacks but also incredibly dependent on companies and people who may not have our best interests at heart. I consider myself pretty environmentally conscious, but I still think some things should have a real-life, tangible backup.
Thank you for spreading awareness on this subject. While I appreciate the comforts of digitilisation and cash-free payment options, I am weary of the amount of power it gives (big tech) corporations and governments and still want to be able to choose. I'm very worried about "options" becoming mandatory and people need to realise that there is a shadow side to these developments - digital warfare, as you've already mentioned, being one of them. Just imagine how vulnerable societies/nations that are 100% digitalised will be making themselves?!