alt Hacker Newsbefore anyone jumps on the pedantry bandwagon, its worth noting that even though open war hasn’t been called: the attacks on infrastructure especially cyber warfare is extremely active and, crucially, direct.
It is totally fair to say that in a digital context, Russia is absolutely at war with Europe.
As far as I can tell, they don’t even try to hide it.
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Some could say that in the cyber realm, they are not petty, ya! Well, or something like that.
Eversince notpetya and the colonial pipeline hack, the cyber strategy game changed a lot. Notpetya was genius as a deployment, because they abused the country's tax software deployment pipeline to cripple all (and I mean all, beyond 99%) businesses in one surgical strike.
The same is gonna happen to other tax software providers, because the DATEV AG and similar companies are pretty much the definition of digital incompetence wherever you look.
I could name other takedowns but the list would continue beyond a reasonable comment, especially with vendors like Hercules and Prophete that are now insolvent because they never prioritized cyber security at all, got hacked, didn't have backups, and ran out of money due to production plant costs.
Europe has sanctioned Russia, frozen hundreds of billions of its assets (threatening to seize them), cut diplomatic relationships and even direct travel. It's arming Russia's adversary and providing it with logistic and intelligence support. It keeps repeating that its goal is to see Russia defeated in war. Then it's a bit rich to complain that "Russia is at war with Europe". Seems to me that it's Europe that has decided to go to war against Russia in all except with boots on the ground.
What I am starting to appreciate about these digital infrastructure attacks is that they may be reversible and or temporary. It can be a nice feature.
Not to mention the information war they have been waging globally since 2016