Tue 13 October 2020:
Russia was behind a cyberattack launched against the Norwegian parliament in August targeting the email system of the country’s parliament, the Norwegian foreign minister said.
On September 1, the Storting, the unicameral Norwegian parliament, announced that it had been the target of a “vast” computer attack a few days earlier, without specifying its origin. Data “of a small number of deputies and employees” had been downloaded, he added.
“The fact that we go out with an attribution is a strong signal … from Norwegian authorities,” Soreide told reporters outside the ministry.
When they first announced the incident, Norwegian authorities did not say who they thought was behind the attack.
Norway wanted to have a pragmatic relationship with Russia, but could not accept such attacks against its democratic institutions, Soreide added, when asked whether the attack would have consequences for the relationship between Norway and Russia.
The Russian foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters news agency while officials at the embassy in Oslo were also not immediately available for comment.
In its annual threat assessment published in February, Norway’s Police Security Service (PST, the domestic intelligence agency) warned of “computer network operations” that it said represented a “persistent and long-term threat to Norway”.
In 2018, NATO member Norway arrested a Russian national suspected of gathering information on the parliament’s internet network, but released him several weeks later due to a lack of evidence.
The two countries, which share a common border in the Arctic, have generally enjoyed good relations, but those have become strained since the Russian annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014.
