Russia uses criminal networks to increase the sabotage laws, says Europol | Cybercrime

Russia and other state actors lead to an increase in politically motivated cyber attacks and the sabotage of the infrastructure and public institutions in the EU, the Bloc police authority has determined.

The 80-page evaluation of the 80-page and organized crime threat for 2025 also describes in detail how “hybrid threat players” have set up a “shadow alliance” with organized criminal gangs in Europe to try to destabilize the functionality of the EU and its member states.

It identifies “a wide range of criminal activities and tactics” used by “criminal proxies”, including sabotage, arson, cyber attacks, data theft and smuggling of migrants.

The report does not expressly identify Russia as a “hybrid threat player”, although it determines: “The politically motivated cyber attacks against critical infrastructure and public institutions that come from Russia and countries in its sphere of influence.”

The EU Commissioner for Internal Affairs and Migration, Magnus Brunner, said at the start of the report: “Criminal networks that work in the name of foreign powers – some threats in less than one second.

When introducing the report in the European headquarters in the Hague, the Polish State Secretary of the State for Internal Affairs, Maciej Duszczyk, a recently said a hospital that had interrupted medical care for several hours.

He also said that migrant smuggling incidents on the border with Belarus ran to 150 to 170 a day and state actors worked with criminal gangs in the Middle East and in Turkey.

The assessment of the threats issued by criminal gangs by Eurol is carried out every four years.

The police chief of Poland, Marek Borón, warned that the Russian invasion of Ukraine, even if a peace agreement is affected, have a permanent influence to exert influence with a potential “increase in the black market in weapons and ammunition and attempts from the criminal groups of Russia”.

On Monday, the public prosecutors in Lithuania blame for an arson attack on an IKEA business in Vilnius last summer to the Russian militaryindely agency GRU, which is also suspected of standing behind fires in other supermarkets and shopping centers, back to fire.

In response to this, Poland Prime Minister Donald Tusk said that the prosecutors had “confirmed our suspicion that the Russian secret services were too responsible for the determination of fires at shopping centers in Vilnius and Warsaw”.

Two Ukrainian suspects were arrested – one in Lithuania, the other in Poland – about the attack.

Europol found that criminal networks in a collaboration that has mutual advantages “increasingly act as deputies in the service of hybrid threat actors”.

This “shadow alliance” enables Russia to use criminal networks in ad hoc -way of using the resources, the specialist knowledge and protection of others to achieve their goals.

Criminal gangs use a “Specht mode operandi”, which means that incidents “originally be rated as individual events, such as:

However, it can occur later that the incidents are “part of a greater strategic goal of destabilization, which contains rather persistent, targeted and cumulative disorders than a single, overwhelming attack”.

“Similar to a woodpecker, a tree weakens over time through repeated strikes, hybrid threat actors operate ongoing, apparently small measures that undermine stability, security and trust in institutions,” said Eurol.

Last year, several EU member states triggered the alarm over a number of sabotage and arson attacks.

If criminal networks also become proxies for hybrid actors, “there is reason to assume that they should destabilize the functionality of the EU and its Member States by concentrating on democratic processes, social coherence within societies, the meaning of security or the rule of law,” the report says.

The Europol report also warns of the increasing use of AI that they provide scaling and speed for online fraud and cybercrime.

In Germany, it found young people who were “cultivated and recruited” via social media and messaging apps with “scriptkiddies” to help them with the codes that are necessary for hacking and cyber attacks.

De Bolle said “online fraud has reached the epidemic level” and AI was an acceleration that is a special challenge for specialists in police networks.