Czech President says his country is in an information war with Russia

Czech President Petr Pavel said that his country is involved in an information war with Russia.

He said this in his opening speech at the Media and Ukraine conference in Prague on Thursday, Euractiv reports.

The organizer of the conference, Czech Radio, was the target of a massive hacker attack on the day of the event, as a result of which the site was inaccessible from Thursday morning. Czech Radio reported that the cyberattack appears to have targeted the conference itself.

The Czech Republic is waging an information war with Russia, not a conventional war, Pavel said at the conference, adding that the groundwork for Russia's war in Ukraine was laid in the information space long before the invasion.

Indeed, the first target of military aggressors in wartime is information, because separating people from the truth helps aggressors win, the Czech president added.

Thursday was a busy day for hackers, as the website of the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs was also subjected to a DDoS attack by the pro-Kremlin hacker group NoName during the day. DDoS attacks involve redirecting large amounts of Internet traffic to websites, overloading their servers, and causing them to crash.

According to the hacker group, the attack is related to a Foreign Ministry report published on Wednesday, which called for a change in relations with Russia. "Czech policy towards Russia in the coming months will focus on how to contribute to Ukraine's victory in the Russian war and how to contribute to Russia's international isolation," Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky said at the presentation of the report.

"We will continue to strengthen our ability to counter Russia's hybrid actions. We want to continue to limit contact with Russia to a basic level in clearly defined areas. We will support Russian civil society and human rights defenders," he added.

Author - Olena Madiak, 23/06/2023