Online threat groups’ activities with a focus on states’ public sector in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict

This paper attempts to investigate some aspects of state threat groups from the online sphere, based on certain conceptual considerations regarding hybrid challenges and some additional remarks on the online space, which is gaining more and more attention in the 21st century. As for the empirical investigation the Russo-Ukrainian conflict is examined to explore and describe the possible characteristics of online groups’ activities against the public sector of states involved, from a quantitative approach. The overview of the conceptual elements and some methodological remarks are followed by the introduction of the results, which – besides others – imply that attempts to disrupt the capabilities, and attack forms of distributed denial of service can be acknowledged as identical patterns in the investigated sector, although certain specific elements can also be discovered. It appears that disinformation activities and website damage are less frequent however the higher occurrence of cyber espionage can be recognized as a specific characteristic of online threat in public sphere. The examination of relations among online threat groups and the targeted states has revealed that the activities evolve a connected structure, in which significant differences can be observed both in the case of the online threat groups and the countries. As for the former participants, the results highlight the notable presence of pro-Russian online threat groups. In the final section the research outcomes are summarised and potential for further research directions are outlined.