The Border Guard receives up to 50 million dangerous e-mails annually

Up to 50 million dangerous e-mails per year to the border guard

The eastern border of our country has been demanding the attention of the services for a long time. It is not only about the Ukrainian part, which became overcrowded after the Russian aggression, but also the Belarusian part, where it boiled even earlier due to the migration crisis that started in mid-2021. Physical resistance is one thing, but the battle against threats also takes place in cyberspace. And on a scale that some people probably didn’t think about.

Press officer of the Border Guard, Lieutenant Anna Michalska, in an interview with PAP, explained the problem of e-mails with dangerous content coming to the official addresses of this formation. In 2020, there were about 23 million messages per year.

A huge number? There is no doubt, but with the increase in tension on the Polish-Belarusian border, traffic in cyberspace has also increased significantly. Unfortunately, the unwanted one, which is why Graničar concluded the entire year 2021 with over 53 million dangerous messages.

In 2021, when migration pressure on the border with Belarus began, 53 million e-mails with dangerous content were recorded that arrived at the business addresses of Border Guards. A year later, when the situation on the Polish-Belarusian border began to stabilize, there were slightly less, about 44 million, but for comparison – before the migration pressure, the number of such dangerous e-mails was half as low. In 2020, there were 23 million such messages.

Threats in cyber space mainly come from the East

Are you wondering how the formation in question manages to function in such a case? This would not be possible without the appropriate technical equipment and qualified people who make up the Security Operations Center, a team founded in 2015.

It consists of officers and civilian employees of the Office for Communications and Informatics of KGSG [Komenda Główna Straży Granicznej – przyp. red.]KGSG Data Protection Office and KGSG Operational-Investigative Committee.

The SOC SG team diagnoses, for example, incidents and threats affecting the functioning of border guards’ networks and systems, i.e. threats caused by malicious software, dangerous Internet transactions and threats to ICT infrastructure caused by dangerous content of electronic mail registered on incoming mail servers.

Stanisław Żaryn, State Secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office, adds that politically motivated threats in cyberspace are primarily created by Russia and Belarus. At the same time, he emphasizes that not all attacks can be attributed to them because both larger and smaller criminal groups are constantly active.

Source: pope