Leonid Volkov, who was brutally attacked in March, says he shares his late friend’s belief in ‘beautiful Russia of the future’
Leonid Volkov, a close ally of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, has vowed to “never give up” fighting against Vladimir Putin despite recently being attacked outside his home.
The military alliance turns 75 soon. But there’s little to celebrate in Kyiv, as Putin’s forces continue their bloody advance
Nato’s grand 75th birthday celebration in Washington in July will ring hollow in Kyiv. The alliance has miserably failed its biggest post-cold war test – the battle for Ukraine. Sadly, there’s no denying it: Vladimir Putin is on a roll.
Advancing Russian forces in Kharkiv profit from the west’s culpably slow drip-feed of weaponry to Kyiv and its leaders’ chronic fear of escalation. Ukraine receives just enough support to survive, never to prevail. Now even bare survival is in doubt.
Researcher uncovers vast Facebook campaign and accuses Meta of ‘lack of willingness’ to counter it
The stories are doom-laden, laced with vitriolic sneers about Emmanuel Macron, Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Ursula von der Leyen. Ukrainians are “ready to depose” their leader, Macron is breaking French “rules” with aid to Ukraine, an “uncontrolled influx” from the east is “seriously harming the Germans”.
According to new research, these are just a few examples of a vast pro-Russian propaganda campaign washing over Facebook accounts of French and German citizens, before the European parliament elections next month.
Ukraine’s president says air defences must quadruple to halt Russian advance as morale falls among troops
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has said he expects Russia to step up its offensive in the north-east and warned Kyiv has only a quarter of the air defences it needs to hold the front line.
Russian forces, which had made only moderate advances in recent months, launched a surprise assault in Kharkiv region on 10 May that has resulted in their biggest territorial gains in a year-and-a-half.
Hospice patient Lynne Cottignies welcomes proposals to make it legal to help eligible people end their lives. Many others have serious concerns
Lynne Cottignies has been planning her funeral. A wicker coffin and a church service with Ave Maria and All Things Bright and Beautiful, followed by a wake at the Royal Jersey golf club where she was lady captain a few years ago. Later, close friends and family will scatter her ashes on a beach near her Jersey home, a spot where they have enjoyed happy sunset barbecues.
Between now and then, Cottignies, 71, faces the prospect of increasing and potentially unbearable pain as the cancer that started in her breast spreads. “I’ve had a lot of different chemo treatments, and just about every side-effect possible. But now time’s up. I’m too weak for anything else.”
As fierce street battles between Russian and Ukrainian forces continue in the northern part of the town, a band of local police and volunteers have been journeying in daily to evacuate the last, terrified residents out of a place which was once home to 18,000 people.
The attempted assassination of a leader sympathetic to Putin has Europe on edge. But exaggerating the fascist threat is also dangerous
The shooting of the Slovakian prime minister, Robert Fico, has dramatised the increasingly angry and polarised landscape of European politics. With just weeks to go before the European parliament elections, it is time to step back from the brink.
This eruption of violence in the midst of the campaign is so shocking that it may, at best, have a chastening effect, softening the venomous tone of political discourse by reminding democracies old and new of what they stand to lose.
Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre
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Boxer has raised funds for Ukraine but faced criticism in the past for his apparent Moscow-leaning sympathies
On the streets of Kyiv this week, the name of the Ukrainian heavyweight boxer Oleksandr Usyk prompted a few eye-rolls, alongside expressions of admiration for his sporting prowess.
The former cruiserweight, who fights the Briton Tyson Fury for the undisputed heavyweight championship in Saudi Arabia on Saturday night, has been an active fundraiser for the Ukrainian military and humanitarian causes since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion. His success in the ring is a matter of considerable national pride.
Ukrainian president admits his army lacks enough troops and has only 25% of the air defences it needs as Russia advances in the north-east. What we know on day 815
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has warned that Russia’s offensive in the north-eastern Kharkiv region this month may only be the “first wave” of several and Russian troops could aim for the city of Kharkiv. “We have to be sober and understand that they are going deeper into our territory. Not vice versa,” Zelenskiy said on Friday in an interview with AFP. Russian forces “want to attack” the city, one of Ukraine’s largest, although they realise it would be “very difficult”, he added.
Zelenskiy said the situation in the region, where Russia has seized several border villages, was “controlled” but “not stabilised” after Ukraine sent reinforcements. The president said Russian troops had penetrated 5-10km along the north-eastern border before being stopped by Ukrainian forces.
Russia hit Kharkiv with more strikes on Friday that killed at least three people and injured 28, the city’s mayor, Igor Terekhov said. The Kharkiv regional governor, Oleg Synegubov, said Russian forces were trying to surround Vovchansk, an almost deserted town near the border. Russian strikes in Vovchansk killed one man.
Moscow expanded the area of active combat by almost 70km by launching its offensive in the Kharkiv region, Ukraine’s army chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, has said. Syrskyi said Russia launched the offensive to force Ukraine to throw additional reserve brigades into fighting. He added that he expected fighting to intensify as troops are also preparing to defend in northern region of Sumy.
Vladimir Putin said Russian forces advancing in the Kharkiv region were creating a “buffer zone” to protect Russian border regions, but said capturing the city of Kharkiv was not part of Moscow’s current plan.The Russian president, who made the comments at a news conference during a state visit to China, said the recent thrust into the Kharkiv region was a response to Ukrainian shelling of Russian border regions such as Belgorod.
A Ukrainian drone attack killed one person and injured another in the Belgorod region, the regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said on Friday. Russia’s defence ministry later reported that air defence units had intercepted and destroyed 14 multiple-launch rockets originating in Ukraine. A massive Ukrainian drone attack on Crimea early on Friday caused power cutoffs in the city of Sevastopol and set a refinery ablaze in southern Russia.
Zelenskiy has admitted Ukraine’s army needs more troops to boost the forces’ morale. “We need to staff the reserves … A large number of [brigades] are empty,” the president said. Many Ukrainian soldiers have been fighting for more than two years without the possibility to be discharged. The army is struggling to recruit, while fighters are growing exhausted and angry at the lack of rotation. “We need to do this so that the guys have a normal rotation. Then their morale will be improved,” Zelenskiy said.
Ukraine only has a quarter of the air defences it needs, Zelenskiy has said, and called for more than a hundred aircraft to counter Russian air power. “So that Russia does not have air superiority, our fleet should have 120 to 130 modern aircraft … to defend the sky against 300 [Russian] aircraft,” he said.
Putin is seeking to weaponise the threat of mass migration to divide and weaken Europe, the Estonian prime minister, Kaja Kallas, said on Friday. “What our adversaries know is migration is our vulnerability,” she said. “The aim is to make life really impossible in Ukraine so that there would be migration pressure to Europe, and this is what they are doing.” Kallas conceded that some countries in Europe did not see the threat of a Ukrainian defeat in the same way. “They don’t see and they don’t believe that if Ukraine falls Europe is in danger, the whole of Europe, maybe some countries, but not the whole of Europe.”
The frustration that erupted into deadly violence in the French territory last week has been building for years
In the middle of the main road in Rivière-Salée, north of Nouméa, sits a burnt-out car. After days of rioting, young men with masked faces wave a Kanak flag as vehicles pass. All around is desolation. Shops with gutted fronts, burnt buildings, debris on the pavements and roads. Gangs of young people roam the area.
The violence that erupted last week is the worst in New Caledonia since unrest involving independence activists gripped the French Pacific territory in the 1980s.
‘Bakery scent’ added via microcapsules to postage stamp celebrating ‘jewel of French culture’
The French Post Office has released a scratch-and-sniff postage stamp to celebrate the baguette, once described by President Emmanuel Macron as “250 grams of magic and perfection”.
The stamp, which costs €1.96, depicts a baguette decorated with a red, white and blue ribbon. It has a print run of 594,000 copies.
Cannes film festival A drama of despair plays out in a remote village, as a debt-ridden father is mortified to discover his son is gay
Here is a self-laceratingly painful tale of repression and denial in a remote Romanian village in the Danube delta, directed by Emanuel Parvu. It’s in the gimlet-eyed observational and satirical style of the new Romanian cinema, a kind of movie-making that in extended dialogue scenes seeks out the bland bureaucratic language of the police and church authorities; their evasive mannerisms, their reactionary worldviews and lifelong habits of indicating opinions in quiet voices and in code, things they don’t want to be held responsible for, and for things they want to keep enclosed in silence.
The drama concerns a careworn guy, Dragoi (Bogdan Dumitrache), who owes money to a local tough guy and is badly behind with the debt. Then he discovers that his 17-year-old son Adi (Ciprian Chiujdea), the apple of his eye – whom he is planning to send to military school next year, and whom he fondly imagines to be dating a local girl – has been badly beaten up by the money-lender’s sons. With icy rage, Dragoi takes this to be the man’s unforgivably violent way of demanding his money.
The US, whose founders tried to emulate the laws and governmental structures of the Roman republic, is headed for a similarly self-inflicted collapse, director Francis Ford Coppola has said at the premiere of his first film in more than a decade.
“What’s happening in America, in our republic, in our democracy, is exactly how Rome lost their republic thousands of years ago,” Coppola told a press conference at the Cannes film festival on Friday. “Our politics has taken us to the point where we might lose our republic.”
Updated guidelines strip bishops of power to recognise ‘supernatural’ nature of purportedly divine events
Apparitions of the Virgin Mary and weeping statues have been part of Catholicism for centuries, but the age of social media has prompted the Vatican to issue a crackdown against potential scams and hoaxes.
New rules issued on Friday say that only a pope, rather than local bishops, can declare apparitions and revelations to be “supernatural”. The document, Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena, updates previous guidance issued in 1978 that is now considered “inadequate”.
Attack on prime minister lifts lid on divided politics of ‘one of the most polarised countries in Europe’
On Friday morning, Father Tomáš stood solemnly in the small Catholic church nestled near a park along the banks of the Danube River in Bratislava.
He had seen an increase in visitors since Wednesday’s shock shooting of Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, which has prompted soul-searching among the country’s deeply divided society. The priest, who did not wish to give his full name, planned to hold his weekly Sunday service to pray “for peace in Slovakia, so that we find mutual respect and understanding”.
‘Adversaries know migration is our vulnerability,’ says Kaja Kallas, spelling out negative consequences to Europe of Ukrainian defeat
Vladimir Putin is seeking to weaponise the threat of mass migration to divide and weaken Europe as supporters of Ukraine struggle to maintain unity to defeat Russia, Kaja Kallas, the Estonian prime minister, says.
“What our adversaries know is migration is our vulnerability,” she said. “The aim is to make life really impossible in Ukraine so that there would be migration pressure to Europe, and this is what they are doing.”
School must-have is setting pressured parents back £30 but could help keep kids off sugary drinks
From loom bands to fidget spinners, playground crazes are usually cheap and cheerful, but the latest must-have is an expensive drinks bottle that comes with scent pods that trick your brain into thinking water is cola or fruit juice.
The growing popularity of Air Up, with the cheapest bottles starting at about £30, is a dilemma for parents.
French police shot dead a man armed with a knife and an iron bar who set fire to a synagogue in the Normandy city of Rouen on Friday.
The interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, travelling to visit the fire-damaged synagogue, said France was “deeply affected” by what he called an antisemitic act. He said the government was “extremely determined to continue to fully protect Jewish people in France, wherever they are, and Jews should practice their religion without fear”.
In Slovakia, we know what ‘restoring order’ means. After the PM’s shooting, it will be an excuse to suppress any opposition
Monika Kompaníková is a Slovakian writer and editor
Shortly after the shooting of Robert Fico, I received a phone call from my sister. She was extremely upset – not just about the shocking attack, but also about an incident on the bus on the way home from work in the moments after the news had broken. Two elderly fellow passengers reacted to the attempted assassination by blaming liberals and progressives in general, and in particular Michal Šimečka, an opposition politician and former vice-president of the European parliament. One passenger called for the death penalty to be reinstated and order to be restored.
At that point, the circumstances of the shooting were entirely unclear, information was partial, and it was too early to condemn or point the finger at anyone. My sister, who considers herself a liberal, spoke up to argue against the other passengers.
Fossil-fuel dependent country hopes to provide bridge between wealthy global north and poor south at November gathering
Oil is inescapable in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. The smell of it greets the visitor on arrival and from the shores of the Caspian Sea on which the city is built the tankers are eternally visible. Flares from refineries near the centre light up the night sky, and you do not have to travel far to see fields of “nodding donkeys”, small piston pump oil wells about 6 metres (20ft) tall, that look almost festive in their bright red and green livery.
It will be an interesting setting for the gathering of the 29th UN climate conference of the parties, which will take place at the Olympic Stadium in November.
The army of riot police had finally retreated from Rustaveli Avenue, the broad thoroughfare in front of the parliament building, back into the barricaded parliamentary estate.
The last hour on the streets of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, had been violent. Snatch squads had grabbed protesters as officers, beating their shields with truncheons, surged forward to push the chanting crowds away from the graffiti-scrawled, imposing parliament building.
Deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov told Russian state media the West is in danger of approaching ‘a dramatic crisis’ as forces make advances in Kharkiv
A long-range Ukrainian strike on the Moscow-controlled Belbek airbase in occupied Crimea destroyed three Russian warplanes and a fuel facility near its main runway this week, US commercial satellite company Maxar said.
The company cited satellite imagery taken on Thursday as showing that two MiG-31 fighter jets and an Su-27 fighter jet had been destroyed. It said one MiG-29 fighter aircraft also appeared to have been damaged.
Hundreds of people – including children – face lengthy prison sentences under harsh Greek anti-smuggling law
Mohanad was 15 years old when he was arrested by the Greek authorities in November 2022 after arriving in Crete on a vessel that had departed from Libya. He has now been charged with smuggling 476 people and is awaiting trial later this year.
He is one of hundreds of people, including children and people travelling with their families, who have been arrested under Greece’s harsh anti-smuggling law that came into force in 2014 with jail sentences of up to 25 years.
Azerbaijani flags have sprung up at demonstrations in Pacific territory, while separatists from French territories have been invited to Baku
France’s government says it has no doubt that Azerbaijan is stirring tensions in New Caledonia, despite the vast geographical and cultural distance between the Caspian country and the French Pacific territory.
In the hours after Fico was shot on Wednesday, several senior politicians from the ruling coalition blamed independent media and the opposition for the incident.
Ukraine accuses invaders of killing civilians and setting up human shields; sanctions over North Korean arms supply to Russia. What we know on day 814
Russia does not have sufficient forces on the ground to make a major breakthrough in Ukraine after launching its offensive in the Kharkhiv region, Nato’s supreme allied commander for Europe, Christopher Cavoli, said on Thursday. “More to the point they don’t have the skill and the ability to do it,” said the US general. “I’ve been in very close contact with our Ukrainian colleagues and I’m confident that they will hold the line.
Ukraine said on Thursday it was trying to “stabilise” the frontline in the Kharkiv region. Moscow has seized 278 sq km (107 sq miles) of Ukrainian territory between 9 and 15 May, based on data from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). It represents the largest territorial gain in a single operation since mid-December 2022. Cavoli said Ukraine’s forces were “being shipped vast amounts of ammunition, vast amounts of short range air defence systems and significant amounts of armoured vehicles right now”.
Dan Sabbagh writes that Russia’s rapid advances in Kharkiv raise serious questions about Kyiv’s ability to defend itself. Russia had telegraphed the operation in advance and Ukraine was warned by western intelligence, Sabbagh writes – though military analysts stress there are explanations for why Ukraine has been forced back. “It’s suicidal for Ukraine to have its main line of defence on the border, where the Russians can hit you with artillery and glide bombs and the Ukrainians don’t have weapons available like Himars rocket artillery to hit back because of US restrictions,” said George Barros, an analyst with the Institute for the Study of War. As a result, Russian forces were able to mass across the border in a relatively safe space, then mobilise into a lightly populated “grey zone” of Ukraine.
Ukraine accused Russia of capturing and killing civilians in the border town of Vovchansk and of keeping about 35 to 40 people as “human shields”. “According to operational information, the Russian military, trying to gain a foothold in the city, did not allow local residents to evacuate,” said the interior minister, Igor Klymenko. “They began abducting people and driving them to basements.” Sergiy Bolvinov, head of the Kharkiv region’s police investigation department: “The Russians keep them in one place and actually use them as a human shield, as their command headquarters is nearby.” There was no immediate response from Moscow to the allegations.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy met military leaders in Kharkiv city and said: “The situation in the Kharkiv region is generally under control, and our soldiers are inflicting significant losses on the occupier. However, the area remains extremely difficult. We are reinforcing our units.”
A protracted air raid alert in most of the Kharkiv region was lifted early on Friday. The regional governor, Oleh Syniehubov, said at least five drones struck Kharkiv. The public broadcaster Suspilne said an air raid alert had been in effect for more than 16 1/2 hours in Kharkiv city, the longest recorded since the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Ukrainian attacks have destroyed one or more Russian warplanes and infrastructure at the Belbek airbase in occupied Crimea, according to reporting based on satellite imagery and other resources. The pro-Ukrainian partisan force Atesh said a warehouse at Belbek was hit, destroying ammunition for Russian warplanes. Multiple fires at the Belbek complex have been detected by Nasa’s satellite fire tracking service, Firms, in recent days. Ukrainian strikes using Atacms missiles were characterised by occupation authorities as having been repelled, in line with standard Russian official language playing down Ukrainian operations.
Friends in town of Levice say 71-year-old showed no signs of planning attack, while Slovakian president says climate of hate is collective work
Mile L’udovit, like other residents of the unassuming grey apartment block on the outskirts of the sleepy central Slovakian town of Levice, considered Juraj Cintula a reliable neighbour and friend.
Having lived side by side with him for more than 40 years, L’udovit could never have imagined the 71-year-old former security guard and amateur poet would be suspected of perpetrating the worst political attack in Slovakian modern history – shooting the prime minister multiple times at point-blank range.
The assassination attempt has shocked the country, but reflects deep divisions there and across Europe
Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, is an immensely divisive figure who has helped polarise his country. But Wednesday’s assassination attempt has rightly united figures from across the political spectrum and the world in condemnation. The shooting was not only an attack on the prime minister but, as his domestic opponents stressed, an attack on democracy itself.
The background and motivation of this attack are not yet fully known. Ministers have suggested that the suspect now in custody was a “lone wolf” who disagreed with the government’s justice and media policies. But the case is widely seen as a shocking manifestation of the deep ruptures in Slovakian society. “What happened yesterday was an individual act. But the tense atmosphere of hatred was our collective work,” warned the outgoing president, Zuzana Čaputová – an opponent of Mr Fico who is stepping down after herself receiving death threats. It will also fuel concerns about extremism and attacks on politicians elsewhere in the continent.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Hazel Behan, who says main suspect in Madeleine McCann case raped her in Portugal in 2004, tells court she will never forget his eyes
A woman who alleges she was raped at knifepoint by the main suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann has told a court she would never forget the eyes of her attacker, which “bored into my skull”.
Giving evidence in the trial of Christian Brückner, who stands accused of five sexual assaults in Portugal of women aged between 10 and 80 between 2000 and 2017, Hazel Behan, 40, who was raped in June 2004, told the court: “I believe that this man was my attacker.”
Adrian Coghill ordered to leave in response to UK expelling Kremlin’s attache to London for alleged spying
Russia is expelling Britain’s defence attache to Moscow in the latest diplomatic tit for tat, after the UK accused it of sponsoring espionage and hacking attacks against top British officials in a years-long campaign of “malign activity”.
The Russian foreign ministry said it had declared the British defence attache, Adrian Coghill, as “persona non grata. He must leave the territory of the Russian Federation within a week.”
Peter Pellegrini says PM ‘escaped death by a hair’ and urges people to temper their emotions after ‘we crossed a red line’
The Slovakian prime minister, Robert Fico, is in a stable condition but “not out of the woods yet”, officials have said, as the country’s president-elect pleaded for unity after a shooting that laid bare the deep political divisions of recent months.
The shooting, the first major assassination attempt on a European political leader in more than 20 years, sent shockwaves across the continent, with leaders linking the violence to an increasingly febrile and polarised political climate across its countries in the run-up to European parliament elections in June.
The shock of an assassination attempt could heal the deep divisions that Fico exploited, but the omens are not promising
A few years after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993, known as the “velvet divorce”, the newly independent Slovakian state to the south was already a cause of concern. The US secretary of state at the time, Madeleine Albright, called it “the black hole” of Europe.
Eventually, in 2004 Slovakia joined the EU and Nato. The assumption then in the west was that the country, finally, had a settled identity and a settled set of alliances.
John Kampfner is an author and broadcaster, and made the BBC World Service documentary Slovakia Divided
Government, including far-right leader Geert Wilders, announces it will abandon key green policies in strategy
The Netherlands’ new right-wing coalition government aims to reintroduce daytime speeds of 80mph on motorways as part of a number of proposed changes to the country’s environmental policies which have sparked concern.
The move echoes the anti-green stance of other right-wing parties across the continent, as environmental issues become popular bogeymen for populist politicians. In Germany, for example, heat pumps have been politicised, as members of the far-right party AfD have called the Green party “our enemies’.
Sisters of Notre-Dame-des-Neiges started enterprise to cover soaring electricity costs
The sisters of Notre-Dame-des-Neiges in south-east France are prepared to move more than heaven and earth to save their mountain abbey and pay soaring electricity bills.
A dozen Cistercian order nuns are making ends meet by selling cleaning products made from their own spring water and essential oils on the internet and in local shops.
Researchers recently uncovered two new backdoors implanted within the infrastructure of a European Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) and its diplomatic missions.
Slovakian cybersecurity firm ESET who found these two new backdoors dubbed “LunarWeb” and “LunarMail,” attributed them to the Turla cyberespionage group believed to be aligned with Russian interests.
Turla has operated since at least 2004, possibly starting in the late 1990s. Linked to the Russian FSB, Turla primarily targets high-profile entities like governments and diplomatic organizations in Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East. Notably, they have breached significant organizations such as the US Department of Defense in 2008 and the Swiss defense company RUAG in 2014.
Researchers believe the Lunar toolset that has been used since at least 2020 is an addition to the arsenal of Russia-aligned cyberespionage group Turla based on the similarities between the tools’ tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and past activities.
LunarWeb Backd: Used to Navigate the Digital Terrain
LunarWeb backdoor stealthily infiltrates servers, establishing its foothold within the targeted infrastructure. Operating covertly, it communicates via HTTP(S) while mirroring legitimate traffic patterns to obfuscate its presence.
Concealment is key in LunarWeb's playbook. For this the backdoor used steganography technique. This backdoor covertly embeds commands within innocuous images, effectively evading detection mechanisms.
LunarWeb's loader, aptly named LunarLoader, showcases remarkable versatility, the researchers noted. Whether masquerading as trojanized open-source software or operating in standalone form, this entry point demonstrates the adaptability of the adversary's tactics.
LunarMail: Used to Infiltrate Individual Workstations
LunarMail takes a different approach as compared to LunarWeb. It embeds itself within Outlook workstations. Leveraging the familiar environment of email communications, this backdoor carries out its spying activities remaining hidden amidst the daily deluge of digital correspondence that its victims receive on their workstations.
[caption id="attachment_68881" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] LunarMail Operation (credit: ESET)[/caption]
On first run, the LunarMail backdoor collects information on the environment variables, and email addresses of all outgoing email messages. It then communicates with the command and control server through the Outlook Messaging API to receive further instructions.
LunarMail is capable of writing files, setting email addresses for C&C communication, create arbitrary processes and execute them, take screenshots and more.
Similar to its counterpart, LunarMail harnesses the power of steganography albeit within the confines of email attachments. By concealing commands within image files, it perpetuates its covert communication channels undetected.
LunarMail's integration with Outlook extends beyond mere infiltration. It manipulates email attachments, seamlessly embedding encrypted payloads within image files or PDF documents which facilitates unsuspicious data exfiltration.
Initial Access and Discovery
The initial access vectors of the Turla hackers, though not definitively confirmed, point towards the exploitation of vulnerabilities or spearphishing campaigns. The abuse of Zabbix network monitoring software is also a potential avenue of compromise, the researchers said.
The compromised entities were primarily affiliated with a European MFA, which meant the intrusion was of a strategic nature. The investigation first began with the detection of a loader decrypting and running a payload from an external file, on an unidentified server.
This was a previously unknown backdoor, which the researchers named LunarWeb. A similar attack chain with LunarWeb was then found deployed at a diplomatic institution of a European MFA but with a second backdoor – named LunarMail.
In another attack, researchers spotted simultaneous deployments of a chain with LunarWeb at three diplomatic institutions of this MFA in the Middle East, occurring within minutes of each other.
“The attacker probably had prior access to the domain controller of the MFA and utilized it for lateral movement to machines of related institutions in the same network,” the researchers noted.
The threat actors displayed varying degrees of sophistication in the compromises. The coding errors and different coding styles used to develop the backdoors suggested that “multiple individuals were likely involved in the development and operation of these tools.”
Russian State Hackers Biggest Cyber Threat
Recently, Google-owned Mandiant in a detailed report stated with “high confidence” that Russian state-sponsored cyber threat activity poses the greatest risk to elections in regions with Russian interest including the European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Russia’s approach to election interference is multifaceted, blending cyber intrusion activities with information operations aimed at influencing public perceptions and sowing discord.
Russian state-aligned cyber threat actors target election-related infrastructure for various reasons including applying pressure on foreign governments, amplifying issues aligned with Russia’s national interests, and retaliating against perceived adversaries. Groups like APT28 and UNC4057 conduct cyber espionage and information operations to achieve these objectives, Mandiant said.
Media Disclaimer: This report is based on internal and external research obtained through various means. The information provided is for reference purposes only, and users bear full responsibility for their reliance on it. The Cyber Express assumes no liability for the accuracy or consequences of using this information.
First non-binary person to win song contest calls for home country to allow third-gender entries on official documents
Nemo Mettler’s operatic, drum’n’bass-propelled entry won Eurovision for Switzerland last weekend, making the singer the first person who identifies as non-binary to triumph at the song contest.
Now the performer has their sights set on another milestone: convincing the Swiss authorities to allow non-binary designations on official documents.
Resolutely European young people brave violent repression to loudly reject ‘foreign agents’ law and alignment with Moscow
Mariska Iurevicz’s mother has been crying a lot recently. “She is always asking when I’ll be home”, the 22-year-old says. “I think we are feeling the same. We are nervous and some of us feeling unsafe. But we are very strong. We will do everything to change the situation.”
Iurevicz, a philosophy student at the TSU State University in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, belongs to one of a myriad of protest groups sprouting out of universities and schools that have been driving the mass protests against the “foreign agents” law being introduced in the east European country.
Russian leader praises ‘comradely’ talks with Chinese president ahead of concert to mark 75 years of ‘friendship’
Russia and China have announced they will deepen their already close military ties, as Vladimir Putin met Xi Jinping in Beijing on his first foreign trip since being inaugurated for a new term as Russia’s president.
It is the latest in a string of statements and signals that the warm relationship between the two countries is as strong as it has ever been.
A 29-year-old Dutch woman who has been granted her request for assisted dying on the grounds of unbearable mental suffering is expected to end her life in the coming weeks, fuelling a debate across Europe over the issue.
Zoraya ter Beek received the final approval last week for assisted dying after a three and a half year process under a law passed in the Netherlands in 2002.
Source: www.infosecurity-magazine.com – Author: 1 UK organizations are trailing their European counterparts on time to remediate software flaws in the US Known Exploited Vulnerability (KEV) catalog, according to a new report from Bitsight. The security vendor reviewed the security posture of 1.4 million entities, excluding cloud and other service providers, to compile its report, A […]
Hospital director says Slovakia PM has stabilised but remains in a critical condition after he was shot several times on Wednesday
Here are the latest images from Slovakia.
The former president Dmitry Medvedev praised Robert Fico today, writing that there were few politicians like him in Europe and that he had “reasonable” positions regarding Russia, Reuters reported.
Japan’s economy contracts in Q1, leaving UK as fastest-growing G7 member, while ECB warns policy uncertainty is high
A group of business leaders have warned Rishi Sunak that the government’s migration policies risk weakening the UK university sector, the Financial Times reports, undermining a key reason for companies to invest in the country.
The FT explains:
In a letter to Rishi Sunak, bosses at groups including miners Anglo American and Rio Tinto and industrial conglomerate Siemens, said they were “deeply concerned” by widening funding gaps and declining international student applications that were “a result of government policy”.
They said this risked “undermining the positive impact that international students have on our skills base, future workforce, and international influence”, as well as reducing the funding available for research and industry collaboration.
Cannes film festival Loosely based on fact, Magnus van Horn’s fictionalised true crime nightmare leaves you with a shiver of pure fear
Just in case you were thinking that this is an upbeat story of a sweet young seamstress winning BBC TV’s The Great British Sewing Bee, the needle in question is in fact a knitting needle for giving yourself an abortion in a public bath-house in post-first world war Copenhagen. This film from Poland-based Swedish director Magnus van Horn – making his Cannes competition debut – is a macabre and hypnotic horror, a fictionalised true crime nightmare based on Denmark’s baby-killer case from 1921, shot in high-contrast expressionist monochrome and kept at an almost unbearable pitch of anxiety by Frederikke Hoffmeier’s nerve-abrading musical score.
I was unconvinced by Van Horn’s previous film, the social media satire Sweat, but this new one is horribly effective grand guignol, made with enormous technical flair, like Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd without the bleak humour – there are touches of Lynch, Von Trier or even Tod Browning here. It is about a world in which women’s lives are disposable and in which the authorities are disapproving of and disgusted by their suffering – and set at a time in which the first world war had normalised the idea of mass murder. I actually found myself thinking of something further back to the Malthusian suicides in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure: “Done because we are too many.”
The European Commission has opened an investigation into the owner of Facebook and Instagram over concerns that the platforms are creating addictive behaviour among children and damaging mental health.
The EU executive said Meta may have breached the Digital Services Act (DSA), a landmark law passed by the bloc last summer that makes digital companies large and small liable for disinformation, shopping scams, child abuse and other online harms.
Le Corbusier called grain silos ‘the magnificent first fruits of the new age’. But what can be done with these soaring industrial cathedrals when they’re redundant? A Norwegian tycoon has the answer
If you’ve ever wondered what it would feel like to be as insignificant as a kernel of corn, you can now get a good idea in Kristiansand, a city in southern Norway. Standing on the fourth floor of its new Kunstsilo art museum, carved out of an old 1930s grain silo, you can peer down a vertiginous concrete tube that plunges towards huddles of ant-like people below. Or you can look up, through more concrete shafts, towards tiny circles of sky. You can mimic the journey of a grain by climbing a spiral staircase inside one of the cylinders, or test your nerves by walking on a glass-floored terrace suspended over another shaft, floating above a tubular abyss. It’s a dramatic spatial spectacle – and we haven’t even got to the art yet.
Once home to 15,000 tonnes of grain, this mighty concrete mountain is now a repository of the most important collection of Nordic modern art in the world. It is a 5,500-strong haul spanning paintings, drawings, ceramics, sculpture and full-size architectural installations, telling the story of the past century of abstraction, surrealism and expressionism across Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark – inside one of the ultimate symbols of modernity itself.
Dutch photographer Jelle Krings has been documenting the workers of the Ukrainian railway since the war began. Here, he revisits the families that have kept a war-torn country moving, often to great personal sacrifice
Words and pictures by Jelle Krings
In the early hours of 24 February 2022, when Russian bombs and rockets struck Ukrainian cities and infrastructure throughout the country, railway workers boarded trains heading east. Determined to get as many people as possible to safety, they would end up evacuating millions to Ukraine’s borders in the west.
Ukraine’s new railway chief Yevhen Liashchenko was in the team that guided the network through the first stages of the war. He says his people acted not because they were instructed to but because “they didn’t know any other way”. There was no time for bureaucracy, “decisions were made by the people on the ground, and they love the railway, not as a business but as a family”.
The railway station in Lyman, Donbas, destroyed by shelling
As Georgians rally against an illiberal new law seen as a tilt to the Kremlin, its oligarch sponsor may consider it essential self-defence
Bidzina Ivanishvili has spent much of the last decade gazing down at Tbilisi’s ancient rooftops from his glass castle, a home perched atop a hill that his critics say resembles a Bond villain’s lair.
Since his tenure as prime minister from 2012 to 2013, the secretive oligarch has largely exerted his influence from behind the scenes and is widely described by many Georgians as the country’s shadowy “puppet master”.
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