MOSCOW, October 14. /TASS/. Some Western countries have announced their willingness to carry out "preemptive" cyberattacks and reserve the right to cyber aggression, Russian Presidential Special Representative for International Cooperation on Information Security Andrey Krutskikh said in an interview with the International Affairs monthly, which was published on the Russian Foreign Ministry’s website on Friday.
"Several Western countries have already officially declared their willingness to conduct so-called preemptive cyberattacks, or, more simply put, they are asserting their right to cyber aggression. The Kiev regime is breaking the world record for ‘cyber aggression’ by announcing that it has created a 300,000-strong cyber-army of hackers. The tactic of ‘cyber terrorism’ has become an integral part of the Western sanctions policy," he said.
Krutskikh mentioned a huge number of cyberattacks on Russia, which might be as high as several million.
"The scale of malware use is staggering. According to the UN, the cumulative damage to the global economy from such actions has amounted to trillions of dollars over the past few years. It is expected to reach ten trillion by 2025. Hundreds of thousands, millions of hostile cyberattacks annually target Russia, in accordance with various categories of counting. There was a figure that 25 million cyberattacks were carried out in the year we hosted the [FIFA] World Cup in order to disrupt the event," he said.