Finland has had increased online espionage attempts from Russia since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, security services have said.
Supo, the Finnish security and intelligence service, said the country faced various threats from Russia, including cyberattacks and disinformation.
Last week, Supo said Russia was one of the most active perpetrators of intelligence operations targeting Finland, amid increased tensions after the country’s accession to Nato and the war in Ukraine.
“Russia’s espionage attempts towards us have increased during the war, mainly in the cybersphere,” said Suvi Alvari, a senior analyst for Supo.
Russia is understood to be shifting the focus of its intelligence collection to online activities after the expulsion of several diplomats from Helsinki. In June, the Finnish president announced the country was expelling nine people from the Russian embassy, saying “their actions [were] contrary to the Vienna convention on diplomatic relations”. Norway and Sweden have also expelled Russians in recent months amid claims they were intelligence officers.
“There are quite a few immediate security issues or threats from Russia at this moment,” Alvari said. “We see that Russia has increased motivation for intelligence towards us.” Further cyberattacks were likely, she added.
Significant areas of interest include Finnish Nato membership, support for Ukraine, and sanctions evasion through Finland.
“It’s obvious Russia has the capability in the cybersphere so we’re prepared,” she said. “We assess that it’s likely that Russia will continue to use denial of service attacks [when hackers make information systems, devices and other resources inaccessible to legitimate users] towards us.”
The aim of such attacks was “to create an image of malfunctioning services”, Alvari said. “But we assess that it’s unlikely that Russia would try to physically harm our critical infrastructure on Finnish soil in the near future.”
Sweden said on Monday that it was facing increased threats of cyberwarfare from Russia and other state actors.
The Swedish armed forces’ cyberdefence chief, Maj Gen Johan Pekkari, told the broadcaster SVT that the country was experiencing “increased activity in the cyber domain” and preparing to protect critical infrastructure from future cyberattacks.
In Finland, Alvari said the biggest change in relations with Russia since Finland joined Nato this year was “Russia’s attitude towards us – how Russia is speaking to us in public”.
Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she said, the two countries had “functional relations”, but now “Russia considers us an unfriendly country [which] is something we haven’t had for decades”.
With elections in Russia and Finland expected next spring, security services will be on guard for potential interference. But Supo has not so far seen any signs of it happening.
Alvari said disinformation was used to project a negative image of Finland in state-run Russian media, to which Finland’s 80,000-strong Russian-speaking population could be vulnerable.
“Russia wants to weaken the image of Finland in the eyes of its population and that’s why there’s a lot of negative reporting about us,” she said.
Last week, Finnish investigators said they could not rule out “a state actor” being responsible for damage to an undersea gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea. Putin has rejected any claim that Russia was behind it as “rubbish”.
In a statement released on Monday night, Finland’s national bureau of investigation said its work was ongoing and that there were “still several lines of investigation”.
Then, on Tuesday, the Swedish authorities revealed that an undersea telecommunications cable between their country and Estonia had also been damaged. Sweden’s civil defence minister, Carl-Oskar Bohlin, said the cause was unclear.
